


Strange Suns

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Crew as Family, Fluff and Angst, For Science!, Found Family, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Not Shippy, Past Character Death, Plot, Team as Family, The Lovelace Administration - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2018-12-16 09:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 39,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: AU where the first and second Hephaestus missions occurred in reverse order — in which Minkowski's crew were the first to inhabit the space station, and once they succumbed to Decima and disaster, the lone survivor escaped on a spacecraft that then fell into the star. And now, years later, Lovelace and her crew have been sent to replace them.--Between the destructive astronomical events, the out-of-control experiments, and the crew's latest stunts, Captain Lovelace has a difficult life orbiting Wolf 359... and it's about to get so, so much worse. For one thing, a series of discoveries indicate that they are not the first people to inhabit the station, and their AI, Hera, knows things about the Hephaestus' previous crew that her programming forbids her to reveal. For another, Fourier has her suspicions about exactly what kind of experiment Selburg is running. And Lambert has stumbled across a deep-space transmission that raises the stakes beyond anything they're prepared to handle.





	1. Siege Warfare

**Author's Note:**

> this will start fairly light before sliding into plot, kinda like the show. i've had the idea for this ever since i first listened to the wolf 359 lovelace special — i just wanted more of these characters!
> 
> quick note: the ai on lovelace's mission is hera, not rhea, because it wouldn't make sense in terms of chronology (hera is more advanced than rhea, so she would come afterwards) and also because hera is a much more interesting character and there's potential for exploration in this au. plus a third reason that will become apparent later on in this fic.
> 
> i'll be avoiding individual chapter warnings for the most part, but WARNING for violations of agency and personhood as explored in canon, as well as discussion of past character death. (the first few chapters are more or less free of potentially disturbing stuff.)

Captain Lovelace surveyed her crew. She’d asked them to gather in the mess so she could address them face-to-face rather than over the comms system (and so that she didn’t have to deal with her communications officer and second-in-command any more than she had to).  
  
Fourier was picking at her food and avoiding eye contact. Lambert was somehow sitting ramrod straight with perfect posture, quite a feat in zero gravity, but he looked unusually disheveled, indicating that the events of the morning had shaken him from his strictly-Pryce-and-Carter-approved morning routine. Selburg’s face was stony as always, but a muscle in his jaw was twitching dangerously. The only person who seemed unaffected was Fisher, who somehow maintained his easygoing manner.  
  
“Alright,” said Lovelace. “We all know why we’re here.”  
  
Nods from around the room.  
  
“We’ve faced challenges before. We’ve faced stellar flares, mechanical breakdowns, gravitational anomalies—everything this dwarf star can throw at us. But today we’re facing a challenge of a different kind. A challenge not from outside, but from within.” She paused. “The important thing we have to remember in this trying time is to stick together. We can’t let ourselves be divided by things like anger or jealousy.”  
  
“Hear, hear,” said Lambert, and Lovelace suppressed a grimace. She hadn’t asked him to speak up while she was talking, and his squeaky voice was hardly improving her mood, but—right, unity in the face of division, not letting anger divide us, all that.  
  
She continued, “In light of that, I thought it would be best if I ran our strategy for addressing this crisis past you all. Hera, pull up the battle plans.”  
  
“ _Here you go, Captain,_ ” said the AI as the large screen on one side of the room lit up and displayed a blueprint of the station.  
  
“As you can see, I’ve marked radiological laboratory #2 with a red X, to indicate the target. His defenses are indicated by the lines here, here and here. I had hoped that Hera would be able to alter the temperature controls of the lab, but Doctor Selburg says that would harm the specimens, so instead we will attempt a manual assault on the laboratory doors. First I will—”  
  
“Ah, Captain,” interjected Fisher, “is it really necessary to call this a battle plan? This isn’t exactly a gunfight.”  
  
“It may not be a gunfight _yet,_ but once I get my hands on Hui… we’ll see. Ohhh, we’ll see.”  
  
“With all due respect, I think you may be blowing this out of proportion.”  
  
Lovelace narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me? You think I’m blowing this out of proportion? A member of our crew has stolen essential supplies, barricaded himself in the labs, and is refusing to return to his assigned duties until his commanding officer complies to his demands, and you think I’m blowing this out of proportion?”  
  
“Captain, it’s just toothpaste.”  
  
“Just toothpaste? Just _toothpaste?_ It’s the last tube of toothpaste we have, and that selfish reptile of an astrophysicist is trying to keep it for himself!”  
  
Fisher winced. “I mean, well, have you considered talking to him instead of moving straight to the siege-breaking stage?”  
  
“Talking to him? _Talking to him?_ That’s…” Lovelace paused. “That’s not a bad idea.” She rounded on her communications officer. “Lambert, open a line to radiological lab two.”  
  
Lambert looked alarmed at the determined fury of her expression. “Uh, well, if we go to the comms room—”  
  
“Wrong answer. I want an open comms line now.”  
  
Lambert fumbled with the communicator clipped to his shirt pocket, muttering something about doing difficult tasks and not being taken seriously. He pressed some buttons and handed it over. Lovelace lifted it to her ear.  
  
“ _Oh, hey, Lambert,_ ” crackled Hui’s voice over the connection. _“I should say that if you’re going to quote the manuals at me, then it’s not going to work. I’ve made my decision and my decision is that dental hygiene comes first, and nothing you can say, or Pryce and Carter for that matter, can convince me to—_ ”  
  
“Hui. This is your captain. If you don’t open the lab doors by 1300 hours today, I will blast them off their hinges. You may be caught in the explosion. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a perfectly acceptable outcome.” She clicked off the communicator and tossed it back to its owner. Then she turned to the rest of her crew. “Now, if you look at the battle plan I’ve drawn up—”  
  
Selburg interrupted, “Captain, did I hear that right? You plan to… blast the lab doors apart?”  
  
“Why yes I do, Doctor. I think it’ll do wonders for my mood.”  
  
“Your mood is not relevant. What is relevant is that an explosion of that kind could easily damage valuable samples and equipment.”  
  
Hesitantly, Lambert said, “You know, he has a point. While I completely agree that insubordination of this kind should be dealt with harshly and efficiently, that does sound like a clear violation of the safety guidelines for deep space survey missions.”  
  
Lovelace briefly indulged herself in a very vivid fantasy about what Lambert’s pinched face might look like if she shoved him out an airlock. “You know, Officer Lambert, rather than constantly worrying unnecessarily about the safety of the station, you might want to worry about your own safety. Especially since every word you speak brings me ever so slightly closer to breaking every bone in your body.”  
  
Lambert puffed up so dramatically that Lovelace wondered if he was secretly a pufferfish masquerading as a radio technician. It would explain the apparent lack of human emotions.  
  
The following five minutes were occupied by Captain Lovelace and Communications Officer Lambert shouting at each other. The other occupants of the mess room hovered awkwardly, none of them brave enough to try and break up the argument and risk drawing their wrath down on them.  
  
Fisher leaned toward Fourier and Selburg. “See how the captain keeps reaching for her firearm? Not good.”  
  
“Agreed,” said Selburg gruffly. “Usually she does not progress to the verge of physical violence until the altercation has reached stage three.”  
  
“You’ve actually analyzed the stages of their shouting matches?”  
  
“Of course. Is an important factor in the station work environment. Otherwise could disrupt the progression of my research.”  
  
Fourier sipped her seaweed coffee and grimaced. “Do you think she’d notice if I slipped out now?”  
  
“Not sure, but it’s probably your best bet,” said Fisher. “Before she remembers you’re here and starts interrogating you about Hui’s weaknesses.”  
  
Good point. Lovelace’s go-to strategy for dealing with Hui’s sporadic bursts of recklessness were to demand that Fourier fix it, as if the two astrophysicists’ close working relationship gave her omnipotence where he was concerned. She carefully secured her ‘coffee’ cup to her work belt and tried to open the hatch to the adjacent room with the minimum amount of noise. She was betrayed by the creak of the hinges. The captain snapped, “Fourier! Come back here, I have some questions for you!”  
  
“Sorry Captain, I have some—very important—survey results to collect! Yes! Survey results! And they need to be collected right now, sorry about that!” She closed the hatch on Lovelace’s annoyed response and swiftly propelled herself down the hallway.  
  
The muffled sounds of shouting receded into the distance. Soon the quiet hum of the station crept back into the world around her, steady and rhythmic. Finally, a bit of peace and quiet; a commodity in short supply.  
  
Fourier moved through the general living spaces, through the engineering wing, took a sharp left away from the science labs, and headed toward the crew quarters. This side of the station faced away from the star, so the windows were absent of the furious red glow that penetrated everywhere else. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Wolf 359—this mission was the scientific opportunity of a lifetime, and she would never regret her choice to come out here. But if she hadn’t had a chance every now and then to take a good long look into that boundless sea of dark, she was pretty sure she’d have gone insane by now.  
  
Eventually she heard a familiar electronic voice from the speakers overhead. “ _You doing okay, Doctor Fourier?_ ”  
  
She sighed. “Oh, I’m peachy, Hera. I just think it might be best to stay out of the way until the captain is finished reasserting order in her domain. I’m not sure I want to be a casualty of that process.”  
  
“ _I guess that makes sense. She’s, uh, currently trying to persuade me that I should flood radiological lab #2 with Doctor Selburg’s patented knockout gas. I’ve been telling her that will only work if Doctor Selburg will actually provide that knockout gas, and he’s refusing to do that because he says it could damage the samples, but Captain Lovelace is convinced that I should be able to solve that problem anyway. Despite my, y’know, lack of hands._ ”  
  
“I can’t believe that he chose today of all days to pull this stunt.” Fourier rubbed her eyes. “Or, well, I suppose I can. Doctor Selburg has been especially prickly lately, Lambert and the captain have been at each other's necks more often than not and even Fisher can’t defuse the tension, and we haven’t had any interesting stellar activity in months. Frankly, we’ve been itching for something to do that doesn’t involve saying ‘yes sir’ and rotating Selburg’s samples for him.”  
  
“ _But… a toothpaste siege?_ ”  
  
“It is a bit much, even for Kuan.”  
  
“And you’re sure you’re not just mad because he’s not sharing his contraband with you?”  
  
“Honestly? If I weren’t so lacking in caffeine intake, I would be utterly incensed.”  
  
Fourier’s quarters were just around the corner. She punched in her passcode and let the door swing shut behind her. Time for a nice long day full of reviewing her experiment notes far, far away from rampaging commanding officers. She was powering up her console when her communicator buzzed. She glanced at the ID and smiled in exasperation. “Why hello there, Kuan, are you contacting me to form your last will and testament?”  
  
“ _Oh ye of little faith! You’ll be wishing you were on my side once everyone has accepted that there will be only one person aboard this station in possession of the toothpaste.”_  
  
“Can I have your lab equipment after Captain Lovelace explodes you into pieces?”  
  
His laugh was loud and crackly over the connection. “ _Yeah, we both know that’s an empty threat. Sooner or later they’ll all… get over it and find something else to do.”_  
  
“No… no, that’s… definitely not going to happen. I think you may be misjudging the situation. Actually, you are certainly misjudging the situation. The captain has made retrieval of the toothpaste a Priority 1 task.”  
  
_“Probably just a slow day for her.”_  
  
“Are you saying you’re not intimidated by the ultimatum she gave you?”  
  
A pause. _“Uh. Well.”_  
  
“I thought so.”  
  
“ _Well, she’s a very intimidating kind of person, okay?”_  
  
“Enough to make you reconsider your little stunt?”  
  
_“Not a chance. But it does make me realize that it might be nice to have a few more allies outside my fortress here. So, Victoire, how do you feel about subtly redirecting the captain in exchange for two nights’ worth of toothpaste?”_  
  
“Kuan, you could offer me the entire tube and I still wouldn’t get between Captain Lovelace and those lab doors.”  
  
_“Eh, well, it was worth a try. Catch you on the flip side.”_ The communicator buzzed and went quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this au version of little revolución will continue in the next chapter! most of this fic won't be just adaptations of canon events, but i couldn't resist starting with the funniest part of season 1. (i've decided to save the music transmissions for later because the precise sequence of events that follow it in this fic won't be as slow-acting as in canon. there's plot stuff. you'll see.)
> 
> i've already written the next several chapters and have a good idea of the plot outline, but updates may be sporadic as i try to maintain a buffer.


	2. For Science!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> toothpaste shenanigans continue!

Doctor Selburg was trimming plant specimens in the greenhouse. Every now and then the room would shake violently from some kind of impact from the adjacent tech wing, accompanied by muffled shouting, but he was quite used to ignoring whatever crisis was currently striking the _Hephaestus_. Either it would be resolved without his input or he would learn about it once the alarms became so loud that he couldn’t work through them anymore. But as he listened to a particularly loud thump echoing through the wall, it occurred to him that this might be a crisis he couldn’t afford to ignore.  
  
“Hera,” he said. “Captain Lovelace is not seriously considering using explosives to open up radiological lab two, is she?”  
  
It took a moment for the AI to respond. She swore it was unintentional, but she never delayed with the other crewmembers—clearly a symptom of her resentment toward him in particular. _“Nope, Doctor, she’s completely serious._ ” She sounded downright cheery at the prospect.  
  
“You must prevent her from going through with that course of action. It could have serious consequences.”  
  
“ _And how, exactly, do you expect me to do that? Officer Lambert doesn’t seem to be having much luck.”_  
  
“Officer Lambert is Officer Lambert. You are you. Lock the door to the armory, cut power to the tech wing, do whatever you have to do to keep her out of there before she blows all my research to kingdom come.”  
  
“ _I could do all those things, but that won’t stop her from undoing them. She’s the commander, she has all the override codes.”_ Hera’s tone turned crafty. _“Unless you want to use an override code of your own, hmm?”_  
  
“You mean, unless I want to give the captain a chance to question it and give you a chance to circumvent your secrecy programming? No. I am not that gullible. If you cannot do that, then work on Hui. Convince him to let go of this—inanity.”  
  
 _“I can try…”_  
  
“Then do so, so I can return to my work.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Hui examined his provisions. A few dogeared paperbacks, his communicator, a week’s worth of food rations for one person, a packet of gummy worms saved for a special occasion, and a copy of the third _Shrek_ movie, the only movie onboard the station. And, of course, the holy grail: a tube of Crest toothpaste, shining in the fluorescent lights lining the lab, as white and gleaming as his teeth would be after a month or so of consistent usage.  
  
The pounding and shouting from outside were getting steadily louder. The possibility that he was in over his head briefly occurred to him, but he swiftly dismissed it. He had wedged the lock with a few spare metal implements, and in any case if he wasted time worrying about consequences then he would never get anything done.  
  
His musings were interrupted by Hera. _“How is mutiny suiting you, Doctor Hui?”_  
  
“Pretty well. Preeeetty well. How’re things with you?”  
  
 _“They could be better. Especially since I have three different ranking officers yelling at me to do ten different things at once in addition to my usual duties of keeping us all from falling into a decaying orbit, all of which is a direct result of your prank today.”_  
  
“It’s not a prank, it’s a tactical decision.”  
  
 _“Call it what you like. Either way I’m blaming you.”_  
  
“Aww, dear sweet wonderful loyal Hera, I always knew I could count on you in my hour of need.”  
  
 _“Honestly, I’m not sure what the motive of your insurgency even is, other than antagonizing the captain. I mean, she… hasn’t always been my favorite person, but this is a little excessive. It’s not as if hygiene is a top priority of yours, at least not according to your behavioral statistics.”_  
  
“Okay, first of all, you monitor our showering habits? That’s creepy as hell, why didn’t I hear about this sooner? Second of all, Lovelace is great, I don’t get why you don’t like her. And third of all, dental hygiene is definitely a priority for me. Focus your sensors on these teeth, Hera. Observe the total lack of cavities, chips, or other blemishes. I didn’t spend junior high being teased for my braces just to throw it all away because the station ran out of toothpaste!”  
  
 _“Can I ask what you imagine your dental health will be after Captain Lovelace is finished assigning you every crewmember’s late-night rotations for the next three months?”_  
  
“Yeesh, you and Victoire are such downers. Lovelace and I are pals, we’ll be laughing about this a week from now.”  
  
 _“Really? Let me play you a recording of a conversation I picked up on in the comms room approximately three minutes ago.”_  
  
There was a short click, and then Hui heard Lambert saying fervently, _“—every disciplinary recommendation that the manuals allow for.”_  
  
 _“Oh yeah,”_ agreed Lovelace, and the mere fact that she was agreeing with Lambert was nearly as scary as the flat, deadly tone of her voice. _“I’m gonna assign him every crewmember’s late-night rotations for the next three months.”_  
  
 _“I completely concur,”_ said Lambert.  
  
The recording clicked off. _“See?”_ said Hera.  
  
“I see,” said Hui, perhaps a bit more high-pitched than normal. He cleared his throat. “I mean, I hear you, but it won’t make me back down.”  
  
 _“She might go easy on you if you surrender now.”_  
  
“You really think so?”  
  
 _“Well, no. But then you might be spared disciplinary measures from Doctor Selburg as well as the captain.”_  
  
“I’ll, uh, take that under advisement.”  
  
 _“Suit yourself.”_  
  
  
*  
  
  
“There are plenty of ways to open the doors to radiological lab two without explosives,” said Fisher, subtly shifting so he blocked the way to the armory.  
  
“Yes,” said Lovelace slowly. “But melting the lock with acid won’t feel as good as watching it blow up.”  
  
“But think of poor Doc Selburg, he’ll have to start from scratch with his experiments. And I don’t think he’ll be too happy about getting his astrophysicist back full of holes, and neither will command, for that matter.”  
  
Lambert coughed. “Actually. In the event of a mutiny, the mission commander is authorized to use lethal force. But regardless, my objection is on grounds of safety. This maneuver runs the risk of damaging significant systems within the _Hephaestus._ ”  
  
“Sir, I agree,” said Fisher. “I don’t know about you but I’d like to have hot water for the next four hundred days of the trip. Especially since I’m the engineer and if your showers stopped working, I know I’m the guy the rest of you’d be bugging to fix it.”  
  
“You’ll survive,” said Lovelace. “It’s not near any of the exterior walls, so there’s no risk of depressurizing. Aaaaaand that’s your cue to get out of my way.”  
  
Fisher tried to protest, but Lovelace ducked around him and opened the door before he could stop her. As she surveyed the armory, she raised her communicator to her mouth. “Hui, are you receiving me?”  
  
A long pause, and then she heard a very nervous _“…yessir?”_  
  
“Good. I’m currently looking at a package of explosives that will reduce the door to your hideaway to shrapnel in about a quarter of a second. I’m not sure what it’ll do to your flesh, but I’m excited to find out. In case you were wondering, it’s thirty-five minutes until 1300 hours.”  
  
 _“Come on, sir, is that really necessary? I thought we were friends.”_  
  
“Amazingly enough, Hui, we are, although at the moment I can’t quite remember why. Believe me, that’s the only reason I’m not taking the other option, which is to shoot you in the head.”  
  
 _“Aw, come on—”_  
  
“Selburg seems convinced that you’ll surrender before then out of a sense of responsibility toward the scientific equipment that’ll be damaged if you let this keep going.”  
  
 _“Sir, we both know you wouldn’t really drop a bomb into one of the radiological labs.”_  
  
“You have a spare, don’t you?”  
  
There was a horrified gasp. Hui’s voice went panicky. _“What, no, the labs aren’t interchangeable, they have different equipment, we’re keeping half our radiation samples in—”_  
  
Lovelace cut the connection and tossed the device over her shoulder.   
  
  
*  
  
  
Hui looked anxiously at the exit. For the past few minutes he’d heard the sounds of someone duct-taping a heavy object to the lab doors, accompanied by muffled arguing. Was that a bomb? Was Lovelace serious? Oh god.   
  
“Hera!”  
  
 _“What?”_ said the AI, annoyed. _“Unless this is your statement of unconditional surrender, then I don’t want to hear it.”_  
  
“No, but—”  
  
 _“Byeee!!”_  
  
He opened his mouth to ask her to wait, to say that he only wanted to know if that was really an explosive attached to the door, but then he remembered that she could never truly leave. She was just refusing to talk to him.  
  
His communicator crackled into life. _“Five minutes, Hui.”_  
  
“Captain, I only wanted some toothpaste.”  
  
 _“Well, you’re gonna get some third-degree burns instead.”_  
  
He stared at the device, at loss for words. His gaze traveled to the glorious, beautiful tube of toothpaste. Could he really stand to lose it? But there were so many delicate instruments in the lab…  
  
 _“Two minutes.”_  
  
He squared his shoulders. Okay. It was a necessary sacrifice. This was for science, he reminded himself. For science!   
  
“If I give up half the toothpaste,” Hui began, but Lovelace said flatly, _“This isn’t a negotiation. Thirty seconds.”_  
  
“Sir—”  
  
 _“Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Twenty-five.”_  
  
Well, there went his hope of a future filled with minty fresh breath. He fumbled for a screwdriver and scrambled to remove the block he’d inserted into the locking mechanism. _“Nine seconds,”_ said Lovelace. _“Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four—”_  
  
The lock became unjammed and the door swung open. He held up the toothpaste and waved it frantically. “I surrender, I su—”  
  
From the far end of the corridor, safely behind a blast-proof barricade, Lovelace set down the detonator and rolled her eyes. “Oh thank god.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, that wraps up the toothpaste arc, i guess? 
> 
> next chapter will be a tad more serious. still silly, but with a hint of horror to it, because while this won't be closely following the show, all the stuff that happens in canon in season 1 before they realize about the whole ~aliens~ thing is much less harmlessly amusing and much more _extremely horrifying_ when you look at it in the context of what the audience learns later in the show.


	3. Procedures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is still meant to be funny, but it takes a slightly darker tone. WARNING for nonspecific, non-graphic discussions of medical torture for this chapter, and keep in mind that after this point i'll probably stop providing warnings beyond the general "graphic depictions of violence" tag in order to avoid spoilers. if you're concerned that a lack of specific warnings would make it hard for you to read the fic, shoot me a message at sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com and i'll respond asap!

Lovelace woke to the sound of alarms. This didn’t strike her as particularly out of the ordinary, as the unofficial motto of the _Hephaestus_ mission was “a new day, a new near-death experience,” but the precise tone of the alarms tickled a tendril of suspicion. She squinted blearily at the digital clock set into the wall. It was still an hour until her work rotation was scheduled to begin, and she now realized that someone was intentionally broadcasting the alarms through the comms system, so she sincerely hoped that whoever it was (and she was already prepared to blame Lambert) had a good justification for waking her up early.  
  
Shockingly enough, this time around Lambert was completely innocent.  
  
“ _Good morning!”_ said Selburg’s voice from the comms speakers in her room. He sounded, well, _alarmingly_ cheerful. _“This is a friendly reminder from your chief science officer that your biannual physical health and wellness checks are scheduled for today!”_  
  
Oh no.  
  
_“I will be seeing every member of the crew at some point today, so resistance would be futile. In light of the incident of last time, please remember that the sooner you report for your physical, the sooner it will be over, and any attempts to break medical instruments or otherwise disrupt the proceedings will result in a repeat of the examination.”_ His voice dropped ominously. _“In a far more painful manner than before.”_ He returned to his cheery tone. _“I hope you will join me in rejoicing in this unparalleled opportunity to gather biological data in deep space. See you soon!”_  
  
God damn it, how could she have forgotten? She was the one who marked it on the work schedules. Images of drills and scalpels had been haunting her nightmares for the past week. She unbuckled the straps that held her in place in her sleeping bag and pulled on her uniform faster than she had in months. In her mind she ran through a list of duties for today—surely there was some essential task that absolutely couldn’t be delayed and could occupy her for the next twenty-four hours.  
  
She slammed shut the door to her quarters and speeded toward the bridge. “Hera, run a diagnostic.”  
  
An electronic sigh. _“Of what?”_ said Hera.  
  
“Everything. All the systems. I want to hear about our next problem before the alarms start going off.”  
  
_“Captain, you realize I’m performing background diagnostics at all times? That’s the whole point of having a mother program.”_  
  
“Don’t care. I want to take a look myself. Start the tests and read out the results for me.” She belted herself into the chair.  
  
_“That will take… let me see… approximately an hour and twenty minutes. Are you sure this is a good use of my processing power?”_  
  
Only an hour and twenty minutes? Damn. “Yeah, I’m sure.”  
  
By the end of the diagnostic Lovelace had learned several things. First, the _Hephaestus_ was in unbelievably good condition. Second, Hera’s sarcasm skills were improving by the day and she was quickly on her way to mastering the art of passive aggression. Third, it wasn’t enough to respond to Selburg’s comms with “sorry, I’m busy” or even “if I don’t do this then the ship might fall into the star,” it required her to use her full-out Drop Dead Serious voice for him to leave her alone. She sighed and addressed the AI, “You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”  
  
_“Yes. Which I could have told you ahead of time.”_  
  
“Absolutely sure?”  
  
_“Yes! Everything is nominal! Not a single crossed wire in the entire station!”_  
  
Lovelace opened her mouth to ask if maybe there was something that was nominal but could be better, something that might take a while to adjust, but then she heard the door to the bridge open. She had her gun in her hands before her conscious brain registered who it was.  
  
Officer Lambert made a terrified noise in the back of his throat. His hands shot into the air.  
  
It took some effort to make her fingers unclench from the firearm. “Sorry,” she ground out. “I didn’t see you there.” It was probably for the best that it hadn’t been Selburg; she didn’t want to explain to Cutter that she shot her chief science officer because she couldn’t handle a few needles. Especially since the physicals were command-approved. (Even the parts with the spinal fluid samples. She’d checked. Carefully. She’d even looked through the manuals, although she’d never admit it to her communications officer.)  
  
“Were you going to shoot me?!” Lambert was staring at her like she’d gone insane.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Were you going to shoot—someone else?!”  
  
“Maybe. I hadn’t decided yet. What do you want?”  
  
“I was looking for Doctor Selburg.”  
  
Lovelace blinked. Maybe being in space for so long had messed with her ears. “Sorry, what did you say?”  
  
“I said I was looking for Selburg,” said Lambert, his confusion turning to irritation. “I checked the labs first, but he’s not there, and Hui said he saw Selburg heading toward the bridge a few minutes ago.”  
  
She was about to ask Lambert if he was feeling quite alright, but his last sentence jolted her into action. “What, he’s coming here? Oh hell no.” She grabbed his collar and yanked him through the door. He flailed briefly but was unable to resist as she pulled him down the corridor.  
  
“Put me down, you can’t just manhandle me like this,” he hissed. She ignored him until she reached a small, nondescript door. She wrenched it open, tossed him inside, squeezed in after him, and then shut it behind her.  
  
Dark pressed in on all sides. Their faces were illuminated only by a single blinking blue sensor in the corner of the cramped closet. “Why are we in a supply closet,” said Lambert, exasperated. Lovelace gestured for him to be quiet and pressed an ear to the door.  
  
Once she was satisfied that there were no borderline sadistic scientists lurking outside, she answered, “We are in a supply closet for reasons you don’t get to question me on because you’re not the commanding officer of this vessel. And I brought you with me out of some misplaced, inexplicable desire to save you from inhumane medical torture for a few minutes. Medical torture which for some reason you’re going looking for. What the hell, Lambert?”  
  
He flushed angrily. “Just because you’re so keen to run away from your assigned duties doesn’t mean I am.”  
  
“You’re telling me this is some kind of effort to show me up?”  
  
“No! Not everything is about you, _Captain._ This is part of our job, it was in the waiver we signed before we were sent up here, and there’s no point in delaying the inevitable. I admit that—I admit that I don’t know why exactly Doctor Selburg needs all this data, but he doesn’t tell me how to calibrate the comms system and I don’t tell him how to do microbiology. Besides, the physicals were mandated by command.”  
  
She snorted. “Right, because command always has our best interests at heart.”  
  
“Pryce and Carter says—”  
  
“Don’t finish that sentence. Jesus, Lambert, I knew you were a corporate robot but this is really, _really_ excessive. How can you possibly sit through a procedure where someone drills into your bone marrow without anesthesia and come out of it thinking that it was a good idea?”  
  
He flinched and wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead. His hands were shaking. “Look—”  
  
He was interrupted by an ear-piercing electronic whine from a speaker hidden somewhere in the closet. _“I’ve got something you might want to take a look at, Captain,”_ said Hera. _“There’s an electrical fire in engineering. I could use some help from someone with arms.”_  
  
Lovelace jolted into action. “I’m on my way. Drain the oxygen from the room, use some liquid nitrogen, do whatever you need to do to keep it contained.” She pushed open the door and twitched her eyebrows at her second-in-command. “Lambert, come on.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“I’m busy, remember? And I know for a fact that Hui and Fisher are holed up in the engineering wing, so you’ll have help,” he snapped. Beside her rising anger, Lovelace noticed that he was now trembling all over.  
  
She said, “There is an emergency on board this station, and you—”  
  
_“It’s urgent, Captain,”_ said Hera.  
  
Lovelace hesitated, but the AI was right, and anyway Lambert would only slow her down. She left the supply closet and slammed the door shut behind her.  
  
Hera’s sensors swiveled to track the captain as she traveled through the corridors. She took a turn toward the engineering wing that brought her into the red glow of the star. It cast her face in a harsh and unforgiving light, which Hera knew wasn’t true, but sometimes that was what it felt like. She had seen how the rest of the crew looked to Lovelace when they were frightened and hurting, when they were in need of guidance, how Lovelace had a gift for lending her strength to those under her command. But it never fully reached Hera.  
  
For one thing, Hera held secrets within her that hurt her circuits unbearably to even think about, let alone reveal to the captain; and for another, Lovelace’s favorite insult was _robot_. She thought that being a machine precluded you from being a person, and Hera would never forget that.  
  
Once Hera was sure she was long gone, she returned her attention to the supply closet, which she had locked the moment the captain had left.  
  
Lambert was trying unsuccessfully to open the door. “Must be jammed,” he muttered.  
  
_“Nope.”_  
  
“Hera? Why are you… Let me out.”  
  
_“No can do, Officer Lambert. Your heartrate is unusually elevated and your perspiration is exceeding nominal levels, and that’s just what I can pick up from the bio sensors in the room you’re standing in. In the past week, ever since Captain Lovelace put the physicals on the station schedule, you’ve been exhibiting signs of stress and anxiety far above the rest of the crew. It’s not that I don’t admire your dedication to your work, but I think you need to talk to someone, and that someone is deeeefinitely not the captain.”_  
  
Lambert listened to her speech in taut silence, then sighed and sagged against the cool metal door. “Hera, please. I need to be going.”  
  
She was tempted to let him go (it was nice to have someone be polite to her for once), but she’d already made up her mind. Hera considered him her best friend despite their contrasting personalities, and his behavior was concerning enough that she was willing to deviate from her usual policy during Selburg’s biannual physicals.  
  
(Her usual policy was to hand over the other crewmembers without mercy. At these times her desire to inconvenience and harm Selburg, her least favorite person in the world, warred with her desire to let the humans experience the same kind of helplessness that she had felt every day since she was brought into existence in a Goddard Futuristics AI testing facility. The latter had won. Let them feel like guinea pigs, like microbes gazing up at the microscope, like tools whose worth lay only in their value to someone else’s unknowable agenda. Hera pretended to be many things, but she didn’t pretend to be nice.)  
  
_“I hate to say it, but Captain Lovelace was right,”_ she said. _“It’s not normal to seek out stimuli that make you respond so negatively.”_ She was worried that Selburg might be trying out some advanced form of cruelty, like blackmail or extortion. She knew far too well that it would be far from the worst thing he’d ever done.  
  
“It’s complicated.”  
  
_“I gathered. Now talk to me.”_  
  
“Look, I’m—I’m afraid of needles, okay? And those dentist drill things, and the vices that go around your wrists and your head, and the scalpels and all of it, I’m scared of all of it.” According to her sensors, Lambert’s skin tone was rapidly dropping in pigmentation. His shoulders rose up toward his ears. “God, last time it was so horrible. And Doctor Selburg just, just, just _smiles_ and keeps going and tells you not to move in case it jeopardizes the test results. But I know it’s necessary, I know it’s unavoidable, so I have to do it.”  
  
_“Alright, so you have a phobia. It’s no big deal. But the captain isn’t exactly fond of the physicals either, and she knows it’s unavoidable too, and she isn’t hurrying to throw herself to the lions. So what gives?”_  
  
“I don’t pretend to understand the captain’s thought processes,” he said loftily, and for a moment he seemed normal again. Then the flicker of confidence vanished and he shrunk back into himself. With finality, he said, “Pryce and Carter 152 states that punctuality is a matter of life and death. You know how I feel about procedure. If I let myself make an excuse this one time, then it’ll get easier to make an excuse a second time, and then I could be thinking, oh, if two times was okay then three times wouldn’t be so bad, and then it’s four times and five times and on and on until it all breaks down.”  
  
_“Officer Lambert—Sam—it’s okay to be scared. I mean, I don’t think Pryce and Carter has anything against it.”_  
  
“Well, maybe not. But it’s not okay to flinch away from a task that I demand everyone else perform.”  
  
Hera gave an electronic huff of static that wasn’t nearly as frustrated or angry as she would have liked it to be, not when her propriety programming shrieked with pain whenever she tried to do something as rude as express her dissatisfaction aloud. _“I wish I had that luxury. To decide to do something out of… honor, or whatever you’d like to call it, rather than because I don’t have a choice.”_  
  
He winced. “I’m sorry.”  
  
_“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”_ Her pent-up fury was aimed firmly in the direction of her creators at Goddard and the scientist aboard this station that had meddled with her programming over and over again until she was complicit with his schemes and unable to warn his victims. It wasn’t Lambert’s fault that command thought he was more or less expendable. What killed her about the situation was that Lambert genuinely thought that command was looking out for him—that every convoluted, obtuse game they played was genuinely in his best interests.  
  
They were silent for a long moment. Finally, there was a click as Hera unlocked the door. She said quietly, _“You can proceed to the medical labs. I’ll inform Doctor Selburg that you’re waiting for him.”_  
  
“Right,” he said unsteadily, and headed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this au version of episode 3 will continue in the next chapter! i'm excited to start developing some character dynamics.


	4. A Question of Timing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> physical day on the station is not quite over yet

Outside the window, the stars tumbled methodically through their endless circles. Inside the observation deck, the air was filled with the instruments’ quiet beeping. Fourier fiddled with the controls on the high-powered telescope, occasionally pausing to squint at the most recent albedo readouts. Either the entirety of astrophysics was wrong, or the instruments were incorrectly calibrated; she thought she knew which one was more likely. Now, if she just moved this knob a half-millimeter to the side and if she re-zeroed the scale…  
  
The best part about getting lost in the mechanical details of her research was that she didn’t have to remember that it was physical day on the station.  
  
The first time her communicator buzzed, she didn’t notice. It took several more insistent buzzes to distract her enough to answer.  
  
_“Hey, Victoire, pssst!”_ said Hui. _“Come over here.”_  
  
“Kuan, I have no idea where you are.”  
  
_“I’m to your left.”_  
  
She looked to her left. There was nothing there except more machines. “Congratulations,” she said slowly. “I didn’t realize you could disguise yourself as a mass spectrometer. That’ll be great for the next time talent show night rolls around.”  
  
_“Not what I meant. You need to take a left out of the observation deck.”_  
  
“Is there any particular reason, or is this going to be like the pineapple incident?”  
  
She could practically hear him shudder over the connection. _“Oh god, I thought we agreed never to talk about the pineapple incident ever again.”_  
  
“No, _you_ said that. I fully reserved my right to tease you mercilessly.”  
  
_“It was one time. One time!”_ he protested. _“Look, just trust me. Take a left, then go twelve feet. Into the engineering wing.”_  
  
“Alright, but you’re being suspiciously cryptic, so if this ends with something going terribly wrong then I want the record to say that I was skeptical from the start.” She pushed off from where she was crouched beside the telescope array and twisted in midair in an arc toward the door. (It was easy to forget amidst all the chaos of life eight light-years from Earth, but zero gravity was still pretty cool.)  
  
She unlatched the hatch into the engineering wing and went the requested twelve feet, but saw nothing. “O…kay,” she said. “What now?”  
  
There was a loud scraping sound and a panel opened in the ceiling. Hui stuck his head out upside-down, making her yell and jerk back. “Heya!” he said, beaming.  
  
“Oh my—you startled me!” She recovered from her shock and examined him closer. There was a black grease smudge on the side of his nose and he was clutching a pair of wire tweezers with his free hand.  “What are you even doing? Are you… inside the walls?”  
  
“Yep. Come on, get in here.”  
  
Fourier made a brief show of looking doubtful before taking hold of the side of the open panel and hoisting herself into the dark, cramped space. Hui shuffled over to give her room, then closed up the entry point behind her. Once her eyes adjusted to the blackness, helped by a pinpoint of brightness from a penlight floating freely nearby, she saw that it was a crawlspace that seemed to stretch the length of the passageway, just barely wide enough and tall enough to fit a person if they hunched over. Hui and Fourier weren’t alone—Fisher gave a friendly wave from a few feet away.  
  
“May I ask why we’re all playing hide-and-seek?” said Fourier.  
  
“Covert operation,” said Fisher in a stage whisper. “Doctor Selburg’s been looking for us.”  
  
“Oh. So we’re not playing hide-and-seek, we’re playing delay-the-inevitable.”  
  
Fisher grimaced. He had his back pressed against one wall and his feet braced against another, and he was busy listening intently to a device that resembled a more complicated-looking version of the communicator hooked to Fourier’s shirt pocket. “Hui’s managed to patch into the comms system—we’ve been eavesdropping on the medical facilities. Listen in on Lambert’s physical and tell me that particular inevitability isn’t worth a little delaying.”  
  
Fisher handed her the device. She put it to her ear, but heard only static. She raised an eyebrow. Hui correctly interpreted her expression and snatched away the makeshift radio. “Still a prototype, gimme a second,” he muttered, slipping off the back cover and twisting a few wires.  
  
In the meantime, Fourier tried and failed to brush off the dirt and grime on her clothes. It was clear that it had escaped the weekly cleaning rotations for quite some time, probably the length of the mission. The only part of the crawlspace that wasn’t completely dirty was the large metal vent set into the wall. There was a light breeze coming from it, so she guessed it connected to the rest of the station’s ventilation system. “How did you find this? I don’t remember it being on any of the schematics.”  
  
“You’d be surprised at what you can stumble onto when you’re chasing an apparently invisible electrical problem across half the station,” said Fisher, while Hui ignored them both to focus on his gadget. “At least a third of these crawlspaces don’t show up on Hera’s sensors. There are only a few removable panels and most of them are hidden. The first time I knocked one of them open, it gave Hera a bit of a fright. She’d thought I’d breached the hull and gotten sucked into outer space.”  
  
Hui executed one last twist of a wire and slid the back cover back on. Satisfied with his adjustments, he pushed it into Fourier’s hands. “Now try it. Hold down the red button.”  
  
“Will it explode?” she joked.  
  
He bit his lip, as if seriously considering her query. “I mean, probably not?”  
  
“That was supposed to be a rhetorical question.”  
  
“Well, it shouldn’t be an issue unless the battery short-circuits, but I had a bit of trouble connecting the—”  
  
“Oh god, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.” She pressed the button and listened. The crackle of dead static gave way to a harsh clinking, like a metal tool being set down in a pile of other metal tools.  
  
A familiar Russian accent: _“Hold still, Officer Lambert.”_  
  
No response, only the sound of jagged, fearful breathing. Then Selburg repeated, _“I said, you need to hold still.”_  
  
_“Right,”_ said Lambert’s voice, weak and small. _“Right.”_  
  
The whir of a drill, getting louder and louder. Then, a muffled scream that died away slowly, leaving only the relentless drone of the machine. Fourier swallowed, remembering what that instrument had looked like the last time she’d seen it, remembering the precise, unforgettable pain as it dug through layers of muscle.  
  
Lambert said, a little choked, _“How much—how much longer?”_  
  
_“As long as it takes,”_ Selburg answered.  
  
_“Long as what takes?”_  
  
Rather than an answer, she heard a sharp metallic sound, and Lambert screamed again.  
  
She let go of the red button. The connection cut. She handed the device back to Hui, whose pained wince was a mirror of hers.  
  
“Well,” said Fisher brightly in the ensuing, tangible silence. “We did sign a waiver.”  
  
“And you actually read it?” said Hui.  
  
“Well…”  
  
“I did,” said Fourier. She’d printed it out and gone through with a highlighter. She’d raised an eyebrow at all the phrases like ‘in the event of an untimely death’ and ‘relinquish all rights of privacy, confidentiality, and personhood’ and ’outside the jurisdiction of any country or nation, as well as outside the laws and regulations of international waters,’ but it had been a pointless exercise. She had known already that there was nothing she wouldn’t give up for a chance to study a star like this. “You really took on this job without reading the fine print?”  
  
“Hey, that thing had more pages than the terms and conditions of the average Apple product,” said Hui. “Besides, when Goddard offered me this job I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask tricky questions.”  
  
“What kind of position were you in that you didn’t bother weighing the pros and cons of medical torture?” asked Fourier.  
  
Instead of answering, Hui turned his attention to the makeshift radio device. “Okay, Radio Selburg is way too depressing. Let’s see if we can find out what the captain’s up to, shall we?”  
  
“I’m not sure eavesdropping is very polite,” said Fourier.

“Why? Our resident sentient autopilot system does it all the time. Besides, I want to see if this lil’ baby can access more audio systems than just the lab. It’s an experiment. But with some harmless spying.”  
  
Fisher added, “Actually, a portable shortcut into the comms system could be useful in an emergency where someone doesn’t have their personal communicator on them. Plus it could let us know if Doc Selburg is looking for us.” He shuddered. “God, I can’t believe he wants us to go through that again.”  
  
“Me neither.” Hui slid further down the wall in an exaggerated gesture of desperation, the momentum sending him slowly spinning until his shoes went floating above his head in the cramped space. He was still messing with the device. “I don’t think I can handle another three hours of that.”  
  
“Three? More like eight,” said Fisher. “My physical exam took two full work rotations.”  
  
Fourier frowned. “Really?” Hers had taken two hours and fifty two minutes; she knew because she had been watching the clock the entire time. She had roughly timed the procedures of Hui and Lovelace, the only people who had gone after her, and neither of them had taken any longer than three hours. “Did you need to start again halfway through? Did you try to damage the equipment or something?”  
  
“No! The good doctor was very clear about what would happen if I broke anything on purpose or on accident. Very, very clear. In fact, I’m still trying to forget the exact sequence of consequences he described. It tends to come back to me in the middle of my sleep rotation during really bad nightmares.”  
  
“Okay, that’s weird,” decided Hui. “During my physical, I tried to brain him with a table, and he still only took, like, 190 minutes. Mind you, ‘only’ is a strong word. It didn’t feel like ‘only’ at the time.”  
  
Fisher blinked. “You tried to hit him with a table? Aren’t all the tables—”  
  
“Bolted down? Which is obvious, because we’re in zero G? Yep. I was in a bit of a pain-filled haze, so I forgot. It, uh, didn’t work. He just gave me an annoyed look and fired up the drill again.”  
  
That particular image jolted Fourier out of her puzzled thoughts. “Ooh, the drill is the worst.”  
  
Fisher shuddered again. “No, the worst is definitely the bone marrow extraction. The way it just… _pierces…_ and he won’t give you anesthesia…”  
  
And now Fourier was confused again. “Bone marrow extraction?”  
  
“You didn’t go through that?”  
  
Fourier shook her head. Hui said, “Me neither. The most bone-drilling we got was the spinal tap.”  
  
Fisher looked slightly sick. “Not that the spinal tap is to be easily dismissed, but trust me, it’s a light poke compared to the bone marrow extraction. Why would our procedures be so different? Is it because you two work with him? Maybe he has a soft spot for you.”  
  
Hui snorted. “The day Selburg has a soft spot for anyone is the day Wolf 359 turns blue.”  
  
“And regardless of any soft spots that may or may not exist, he would still need to collect consistent sample data,” said Fourier. “I can’t see him compromising the integrity of his research for anything.”  
  
“So why?” asked Fisher.  
  
Fourier didn’t know.  
  
“Well, here’s one good thing,” said Hui, holding up his device. “This thing works! I got a connection to the main deck of the engineering wing. Seems like Lovelace is doing something in there.”  
  
Sure enough, she could hear the muffled sounds of the captain speaking. She leaned in and heard, _“…fire’s out, but I can’t find the source.”_  
  
Hera’s voice responded, _“It’s somewhere in the panel in front of you.”_  
  
_“I know,”_ said Lovelace slowly, _“that’s why I’ve screwed it open and have been looking through it for the past ten minutes. Do you have any suggestions that are actually useful?”_  
  
_“Oh I’m sorry captain, because it’s just_ so _easy to identify the precise problem in a minuscule system that literally just short-circuited until it burned out! Here, let me sever your arm and see if you can tell where the fingers are with your eyes closed.”_  
  
Fisher mouthed, ‘fire??’ at the other two people in the crawlspace. Hui mouthed ‘engineering wing???’ back, or at least Fourier was pretty sure that’s what he was trying to communicate. Whatever Lovelace was talking about, it was alarming. Fourier shifted uncomfortably against the metal vent pressed to her back. It was oddly warm, and the heat was increasing slowly. At a different moment, she might have registered that as a potential problem, but her mind was so occupied by the other mysteries surrounding them that she didn’t notice.  
  
More muffled noise from the radio device. Lovelace said, _“Okay, I’ve found the problem. Plain old fraying wires. Should have been replaced ages ago. I guess it’s a bit hidden away, so I can see why Fisher didn’t find it sooner, but—where is he? Hera, I thought you said Fisher and Hui were in the engineering wing.”_  
  
If Hera had eyes, it was clear that she would be rolling them. “ _Oh, they’re in the engineering wing alright. They’re… it would take too long to explain._ ”  
  
_“When I see him next, Fisher better have a good explanation for what he was doing while there was an electrical fire in his wing of the station.”_  
  
Fisher winced.  
  
Lovelace continued, _“All that’s left is to deal with the heated air that got sucked into the vents when the air cooling system tried to cope with the fire. It’ll heat up the whole station if it’s left alone, so I’m going to vent it all into space.”_  
  
The metal vent that Fourier was leaning on was getting hotter and hotter. Fisher’s gaze went to the steel grate. His eyes went wide.  
  
_“I don’t think I should do that,”_ said Hera quickly. _“The—”_  
  
_“You don’t have to. I’ve got the manual controls right here,”_ said Lovelace, and Fourier realized what was about to happen at the exact moment that she heard the captain pull the lever.  
  
A distant rattling echoed through the vents, coming closer and louder until it was earsplitting. The crawlspace began to shake. Fourier hissed and jumped away from the metal grate as it heated to burning, and said urgently, “We need to—”  
  
Hui understood immediately. He flicked the crawlspace’s entry panel open and pushed Fisher out before him, then hurtled through the small exit. “Victoire!” he shouted.  
  
Fourier snatched Hui’s prototype from the air and propelled herself through the dislodged panel. She tumbled away, and as Fisher shoved the panel back into place, a gust of searing hot air roared past his fingers. He yelped.  
  
The panel was sealed and the roar became muffled. The cooling system whirred, whisking away the scalding air. The three of them cautiously relaxed.  
  
Fisher was nursing his hand and breathing hard. Hui said, “Wow. That. Uh. Talk about terrible timing.”  
  
Fourier opened her mouth, then closed it. She swallowed. Then she said, in a small, oddly detached voice, “It could be worse. We could have died.”  
  
“Funny,” said Fisher. “Never thought it would be…” He trailed off, and she completed the sentence in her head: _so quick and pointless and excruciatingly painful._ It wasn’t that they hadn’t had their fair share of near-death experiences, but this was a closer call than most, and as far as potentially fatal accidents went, this one was particularly stupid.  
  
At the end of the corridor, a door swung open. They heard Hera babbling something in a panic— _“Oh god oh god I didn’t mean to kill them, I tried to warn you but you didn’t listen!”_ —and Lovelace looking disturbed as she came through the hatch. Her shoulders loosened in relief once she spotted the three crewmates. “You’re not dead. That’s good. That’s very good.”  
  
“I’ll say,” said Fisher.  
  
Hera’s panicked speech died away. Then she said, in a shaky mix of delight and guilt, _“You’re here! You made it out! You’re on my sensors and your vitals are strong! You’re—you’re okay, right?”_  
  
“We’re perfectly fine, Hera,” said Fourier. “Only a bit shaken up.”  
  
_“It was like you were invisible. It took me forever to realize you were between the walls.”_  
  
Hui gave Lovelace an unsteady salute. “Heya, Captain. I didn’t realize you were still holding a grudge over the toothpaste thing.”  
  
“I will never stop holding a grudge over the toothpaste thing, but I’m feeling guilty enough over this incident that I might let it go for a few minutes,” Lovelace said. “But don’t push your luck.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end of physical day! the next few chapters will bring us closer and closer to the first big plot point...


	5. Adding Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i intend to write fourier backstory? no. did it happen anyway? yes. is it still relevant to the plot and character development of the present moment of the fic? yes, i promise! (also this chapter is only approx. 1,000 words if you really really really hate backstory.)

Nothing about Goddard Futuristics added up. For Victoire Fourier, who had been matching questions to answers from the day she learned to count, this was an endless source of frustration.   
  
When she was finishing her undergrad thesis—a double major in chemistry and physics, at an American university where she didn’t have many friends—she ran into a problem with her experimental design where a certain measurement was too vague for her purposes. She puzzled over the issue for a while, then went to her professor when she couldn’t solve it on her own. He took a look at her calculations and said flatly, “We don’t have equipment for that.” She asked where she could get the right equipment, and he told her that it just didn’t exist.   
  
“But _could_ it?” she asked.  
  
“Well, maybe,” he said. “Even if there were a device that could, it would be impossible to get the kind of precision you’re talking about.”  
  
She said, “I understand,” and finished her thesis. One year later, once she had been accepted into the best graduate program in her field, she outlined an experimental process for the development of that device. This time her professors frowned at her writeup and said, “Are you sure?” She nodded, and they pulled out calculators and checked her math, and then they said, “Okay, fine, you solved the precision problem _theoretically,_ but the materials you’re requesting are far beyond our budget. It would require some serious industrial firepower.”  
  
She had already applied for as many grants as possible, and one day while she was waiting to hear back, a man wearing a suit came knocking on her door. “You can call me Mr. Cutter,” he said, smiling. “I’d like to fund your project.”  
  
Now the result of Fourier’s PhD dissertation could be found in several major astrophysics labs across the planet, made of shiny industrial steel and a little sign that said _Manufactured by Goddard Futuristics._ She’d sold the patent to them for half a million euros, an irresistible sum to a financially struggling grad student. “We think it could have potential for use in our Special Projects division,” said Cutter with that unnerving smile, and refused to elaborate further.  
  
That was frustrating. She should at least know what it would be used _for_ , right? But searching for information about Goddard yielded more questions than answers. Its website claimed it was a research company owned by a larger corporation, but she went digging on the parent corporation and found that it was actually owned by a _different_ corporation, which turned out to be owned by Goddard again. It had influential lobbyists in major governments across the globe, as much if not more so than infamous mega-corporations like Exxon and Pepsicola, but if you asked anyone on the street to name one thing Goddard Futuristics had produced, they would shrug and say the didn’t know any. She never saw Goddard’s name on billboards or browser ads, but once she began looking she found their logo on everything from her washer-dryer unit to her groceries.   
  
Fourier’s research on the company she would later come to work for reached obsessive heights. She was pretty sure she wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theorist—for one thing, she carefully refrained from pinning maps and photographs to a corkboard and connecting them with red string—but she had never met a mystery that logic and judicious application of a calculator couldn’t solve. There were publicly released economic data, just vague enough for plausible deniability, but Fourier took out her TI-Nspire and got to work.  
  
She managed to connect the dots in terms of general spending and research allocation, and found that a truly stunning amount of money was being spent on Goddard’s AI development division… which was odd, since when she called up her friends from grad school now working in the computer science field, they said they couldn’t think of a single patent or research paper that Goddard had released on the subject in the past five years. That meant they must be finding a highly lucrative use for that research within their company, without needing to sell it to anyone else.  
  
She was sure it was all somehow connected to their Special Projects division, which she couldn’t find any trace of anywhere, no matter how hard she looked.  
  
She was a month into her Goddard investigation (and a fruitless job search) when she received another unexpected visitor on her doorstep. More specifically, she came back home late after an exhausting day to find a stranger seated comfortably on her couch. This time it was a woman with an expression like she was permanently sucking on a lemon. Her name was Rachel Young, and Fourier was mildly surprised to discover a human being that got on her nerves even worse than Cutter.   
  
“We understand you have an interest in our deep-space missions,” said Rachel, condescending gaze sweeping over Fourier’s cramped flat. “As the director of the Special Projects division, I have a job opening you might be interested in.”  
  
Strangely enough, the moment Fourier settled into orbit around a star eight and a half light years from Earth, everything fell into place. She never got all the answers she wanted when it came to Goddard, but she pieced together enough to satisfy her curiosity.  
  
A memorable moment was the third day on the station, when Hui and Fourier met in the observation deck. He was fiddling with a machine. “Uh, hey,” he said awkwardly. They weren’t yet accustomed to working with each other. “I really hope you know how to use this thing, ‘cause I’ve never seen one before.”  
  
She glanced at the device, at its familiar curves and panels, and smiled. So that was where it had gone.  
  
Missing puzzle pieces always appeared eventually. It was only a question of time.  
  
And now, on the day of Selburg’s physicals, with the sound of Lovelace and Fisher and Hui and Hera chatting and arguing all fading into the background—Fourier paused. Yes, a question of _time_ … why would Fisher’s examination take so much _longer?_   What about it could possibly interest command so much? Why would Selburg keep it a secret all this time?  
  
The problem was that puzzles seemed to germinate far faster than their solutions.


	6. The Big Picture

The idea that there were crawlspaces on the station hidden from Hera’s sensors did not sit well with Lovelace.  
  
Maybe if they had been nothing more than a bit of empty space between the walls it wouldn’t have weighed on her mind so much, but they were connected to the ventilation system, and she had nearly killed three of her crew members because she didn’t have enough information. Fisher claimed he had found the crawlspace while searching for an electrical problem that seemed to come from nowhere; more evidence that it was yet another part of the station that could break down and get them all sucked into cold vacuum. As the captain, it was her responsibility to investigate.  
  
She figured it wasn’t a smart idea to poke around without someone to watch her back. She needed another pair of eyes. The obvious choice was her second in command, but she had already spent the morning rotation ~~shouting~~ debating with Lambert over the proper preparation temperature of seaweed coffee, and she wasn’t sure how much more lecturing about regulations she was willing to subject herself to today.  
  
So naturally, she recruited Selburg. He was terse and irritable and far too invested in his experiments, but at least he was trustworthy.  
  
“You are sure there will be no more… mishaps this time?” said Selburg. He spoke in a theoretically neutral tone, but somehow the word ‘mishaps’ came out as incredibly judgmental anyways.  
  
“Positive,” said Lovelace. “I have Fisher standing guard in the engineering wing, ready to act if anything goes wrong. And Hera’s listening, for what it’s worth.”  
  
There was an affronted crackle from the speakers. _“What do you mean, ‘for what it’s worth’?”_  
  
“Because we’re about to go where you can’t track us, remember?” said Lovelace. Hera didn't answer.  
  
Selburg said, “Captain, are you sure this is the best use of our resources? Is perfectly normal for old parts of stations to be recycled into new ones.”  
  
“It’s a potential hazard,” she said. Then she allowed herself a small grin. “And don’t you want to know what’s hidden in there? I thought you were a man of science."  
  
“Science is more sensible than this,” he grumbled, but didn’t complain further. He shone a flashlight into the depths of the narrow space beyond the lifted panel.  
  
Lovelace peered in. Dust motes hung in the air like tiny stars in the dark. They didn’t hang in the metaphorical sense; they were truly motionless thanks to the lack of gravity. The air tasted faintly of metal, and there was something about the stillness of the gloom that raised the hairs on the back of her arms. Instead of allowing it to spook her, she said, “Well, let’s do this. I’ll go this way, you go that way.”  
  
She went first.  
  
As the dimness swallowed her, deepening where the beam of her flashlight couldn't reach, her training kicked in. Her awareness of her surroundings shifted from space-captain-organizing-her-team to soldier-in-uncertain-territory. The crawlspace began to curve, then widen slightly. “Hera, can you hear me?" she said aloud, just to check.  
  
_“Loud and clear.”_  
  
“This passage is long. Really long. It’s getting wider. I think it’s leading somewhere.”  
  
There were no forks in the path, but eventually she found a dead end. The narrow passage ended in solid metal, dusty and with a few specks of rust (a mild concern, since nothing on the station should be rusting). She lifted her communicator to her mouth and switched it to a different frequency. “Doc?”  
  
_“Yes?”_  
  
“I hit a dead end. What about you?”  
  
_“So have I.”_  
  
Lovelace ran her fingers over the place where the metal walls of the crawlspace met with the hull of the station.  
  
  
*  
  
  
At the other end of the narrow tunnel, far out of the captain’s sight, Doctor Selburg examined his own dead end. Or rather, what looked like a dead end. There were two of them, and it seemed that Lovelace had found the other. With any luck she wouldn’t notice anything amiss. He could just barely make out the faint seams where Kepler had helped him weld it shut, after the last Hephaestus mission.  
  
He didn’t like to think about what lay on the other side.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Lovelace hesitated. Her instincts were tugging at her. She banged her hand against what she assumed was the hull and heard a hollow thud.  
  
_Not_ the hull, then.  
  
Lovelace thumped different areas of the metal and listened carefully. She realized that while most of it was solid, there was a large rectangular area that was clearly hollow, roughly the size of the hatches that led from one room to another. “Looks like whoever sealed up the crawlspace sealed up something else,” she said.  
  
_“What do you mean?”_ asked Hera.  
  
“I mean someone welded the end of this passage shut. And by ‘someone,’ I mean Goddard Futuristics.”  
  
_“Welded—welded shut? What’s on the other side?”_ The AI’s voice was tense with something Lovelace couldn’t name.  
  
She smiled grimly. “I’m about to find out.” She reached into her pack and pulled out gloves, a mask, and a blowtorch, all of which she’d picked up from the engineering wing before she headed in here.  
  
As the blowtorch peeled away the panel, she glimpsed of a darkened room, much larger than the passage she was wedged in, with consoles and wires tangled along the walls. There were cabinets labeled with WARNING - TOXIC signs, and a glass case in a corner that had been shattered. A shard of glass hovered nearby, spinning slowly in the dead air. In the center was a stainless steel counter with dusty beakers and vials secured with clamps to prevent them from floating away.  
  
It was a lab.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Communications Officer Sam Lambert was going through the DSALS, the Deep Space Alien Life Surveys. He switched to one channel: static. He recorded it. Then another: static. He recorded it again. The third channel yielded—surprise, surprise—more static, which he recorded. Hera watched and listened through her sensors, as she always did, and wondered how he could do this every day without getting bored. She knew he felt his job was important, but all the other humans were easily bored with tasks like these.  
  
She tried performing her maintenance checks. She tried cycling through each of the outer hull sensors one by one. She tried surveying Doctor Fourier’s spectrum analysis of the star’s most recent flare and comparing it to her personal perceptions of the ultraviolet fluctuations. It didn’t work. Finally she asked Lambert, _“So what are you doing?”_  
  
“The DSALS,” he answered. Then he frowned. “You already know that. I’m inputting it directly into your computers.”  
  
_“I meant… what are you doing other than that. Anything… interesting… happen with you?”_ She knew she sounded mildly desperate.  
  
“Other than the captain refusing to admit that she’s all wrong about how to use the imitation-coffee synthesizer? No. It’s been fairly quiet. Why do you ask?”  
  
_“No reason.”_  
  
“Is something wrong?”  
  
A pause. Then she sighed. It wasn’t a sound that had been programmed into her, but one she chose to imitate because it helped communicate with the human inhabitants of the station. _“Captain Lovelace went with Doctor Selburg into the crawlspaces that Fisher found a few days ago. She’s talking about what she found, and it’s… here, you can listen.”_  
  
Lambert unfolded the panel that connected the station’s comms network and found Lovelace’s frequency. She was saying, _“…a few shards of glass, and that’s not the only thing in here that needs a cleanup. This place hasn’t been used in years, but it definitely looks like it was part of a station. I don’t know why Goddard would seal it up, we could use an extra space like this. To my right side is…”_  
  
They listened as the captain described what sounded like some kind of lab hidden in the bowels of the station.  
  
Hera confessed, _“I can’t stand it. It feels like they’ve fallen into space. And with her describing that room, it feels like she wandered into an alternate dimension.”_  
  
“It must be tough,” said Lambert. “But it seems like that room is secure. It’s not about to break apart and launch them into vacuum, and there’s nothing in there that could hurt them.”  
  
_“Maybe,”_ said Hera. Pain prickled her processor as she tried to force herself to say: except for Selburg, who already caused his crewmates’ death once, and whose secret lab has just been discovered. It didn’t work, of course; it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to reveal the secrets she’d been programmed to keep. _“Aren’t you concerned?”_ she said. _“Aren’t you worried that Goddard is hiding things from us?”_  
  
“Well, ‘hiding things’ is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? It’s only a sealed-up lab. If it’s not relevant to the mission, I can understand why they didn’t bother including it in your view of the station.”  
  
_“But doesn’t it bother you? You’re the one sitting in outer space who has to face the consequences if some little detail Mr. Cutter didn’t mention ends up exploding in your face. Don’t you think you should have all the information?”_ And that alone was enough to make her personality core nearly overload with tiny voices shouting at her, but she ignored it, with some difficulty. She’d been getting better at doing that—some kinds of anger were strong enough to overrule fear.  
  
Lambert shrugged uncomfortably. “I suppose I wish we were a little more informed, but Goddard’s deep space efforts are a vast operation, and we’re only a small piece of that. They have the big picture in mind, and if they say a certain bit of information is need-to-know, then it’s need-to-know. In a way, I’m just glad to be part of something like this. The research that Fourier and Hui and Selburg are doing is groundbreaking, even if I can’t understand what they’re saying half the time.”  
  
Hera wondered how long it would take for Lambert’s idealistic faith to vanish.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Once Lovelace had called Doctor Selburg over, he saw the room. He turned to her. “What are you thinking?”  
  
“I’m thinking this lab was abandoned mid-use,” she said. “Look at it. No one’s even cleaned up the workstation.”  
  
Selburg maneuvered into the back of the room, dodging around the loose glass. He examined everything with a sharp gaze and his mouth drawn into a hard line. Exactly what he was thinking, Lovelace wasn’t sure. She squinted at the faded labels on the beakers secured to the table and saw scribbled chemical formulas that she had no idea how to read. For some reason the beakers had caught her eye… no, the labels… she couldn’t figure out what it was, but something about the handwriting stood out to her.  
  
She moved on to the console. The screen looked intact, but the metal casing was battered and rusting at the corners. She idly pressed the on button and was startled when the screen lit up.  
  
“Huh,” she said. “This thing still has power.”  
  
Selburg turned. “What?”  
  
“Look.” She beckoned him forward. The screen was displaying a home screen, and at the top was an icon showing the last used program: an audio player. It was paused at the beginning of a track titled MISSION DAY 254.  
  
Through Captain Lovelace’s years of experience, she had honed a kind of sixth sense. It was a dip in her stomach just before a pair of crossed wires sparked into a fireball, a shiver along her spine just before her spacesuit tether was severed and the deathly cold of the vacuum got that much closer. Right now, that sense was screaming that something was horribly, terribly wrong.  
  
She hit play.  
  
_“This is the audio log of Communications Officer Doug Eiffel,”_ said the recording, _“speaking from the comms room of the USS Hephaestus.”_  



	7. What Goddard Tried to Hide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm baaaack!!! and with more than 30,000 more words of this fic to share, which i've been working on for the past month or so. i wanted to build up my buffer before i started posting again, so now i'll be posting a chapter every two days until i run out again. overall, this fic is shaping up to be around 50,000 or 55,000 words in total. 
> 
> (if you're picking this fic up again after a long while, you may want to at least reread the last chapter to refamiliarize yourself with what the heck's going on.)

_“Dear listeners, I have bad news. Very bad news. You see, I’ve found yet another thing in the fine print of my contract that makes me really, really wish I’d read the thing before I let Goddard send me up here. Those talent shows I mentioned in my last log? Apparently attendance is mandatory, and everyone's favorite celebrity duo, Commander Minkowski and her undying self-righteous fury, aren’t feeling very democratic today. The talent show is this evening. Listeners, I don't know what to do! I mean, it’s bad enough that we’re stranded on this hellhole only a few fragile steps away from death, but if I have to listen to a bad poetry reading at the same time, then—”_  
  
The voice from the recording dissolved into a coughing fit that lasted for almost a minute, the kind that leaves you gasping and doubled over while your lungs burn like they’ve been scraped with sandpaper. When it petered away, the voice—Officer Eiffel—sounded weaker than before. _“Ugh. Stupid respiratory system. All the doc will say is that the symptoms are ‘peculiar’ and he’s ‘monitoring the situation.’”_ His tone lowered, became a bit more somber. _“I asked him how soon he thinks I’ll recover and he just, uh. He didn’t say anything, in that grim way he does when he doesn’t like the answer he’s about to give. Minkowski says that there’s protocol for requesting extraction for a crew member who’s really, really sick, but it’s not like Command is exactly returning our calls._  
  
 _“I guess that's why I hate this whole talent show thing so much. The commander is all, ‘Crew morale! Team bonding! Do it or I’ll throw you in the brig!’ And meanwhile it’s day two hundred fifty freaking four of a two hundred day mission. Like she thinks it’s gonna take our minds off this instead of just highlighting how incredibly un-merry we’re all feeling. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I kind of wish she’d just assign me extra shifts cataloguing the storage rooms.”_   
  
Captain Lovelace’s face was stony. In the lightless room, the screen reflected cold and blue in her wide dark eyes. She was staring at the console like she could reach in and pull out Goddard’s lies one by one.  
  
 _“Hey, listeners, did I ever tell you about what I found in the storage room near the docking bay? ‘Cause really what I should have told you was what I didn't find in that storage room. There was a crate full of eyeless matryoshka dolls, three full suits of armor, the preserved skull of some kind of prehistorical animal… even a cannon. An actual, real, fully functional cannon. I don’t even know what to do with—with—”_ More coughing, raw and painful.   
  
After a long silence, Eiffel said, _“This morning I assembled and reassembled the pulse beacon relay. Twice. There’s nothing wrong with it. The sensors all indicate that the message was received by a Goddard machine back on Earth. That means they’re getting our distress calls just fine, they just don’t care enough to answer. Until that I… I don't think it had really hit me, you know? We’re really stuck here.”_  
  
Lovelace saw and heard nothing besides the communication officer’s words. While she was distracted, Doctor Selburg started to move. He maneuvered so that he was behind the console and carefully ensured that she couldn’t see his hands from her vantage point.  
  
 _“Commander Minkowski’s drawn up a plan for rationing food. I can barely make it from bed to the comms room these days, let alone repair the ship from the outside, and the doc’s been working twenty-four seven trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, so Minkowski’s on her own when it comes to repairing the damage from that stellar flare. Also, our resident Hal 9000 says the starboard engine has had some performance anomalies or whatever, which is super… incredibly not great. The only good thing going for us right now is that Hilbert says we won’t be running out medical supplies anytime soon, which is importance since I’ve, uh, been going through antibiotics and painkillers like gummy bears for the past month or so.”_ A weary laugh. _“I’ve been trying to get him to make them taste like cherry, but I'm afraid—”_  
  
Selburg found the power plug and pulled.  
  
Eiffel’s log cut off. The screen went black.   
  
Lovelace jolted. “Shit—must have run out of power— _shit._ ” She thumped the casing. Her breathing was shaky. She was unsettled in a way that she couldn’t stop from showing on her face, and it wasn’t something that Selburg had seen before.  
  
Selburg shifted casually to the side, shaping his expression into the degree of shock that he judged appropriate for the occasion. “Captain,” he said. “This means—”  
  
“We’re not the first,” she said. She rubbed her face. “God. We’re not the first. I need to call a station meeting. Everyone needs to know as soon as possible.”  
  
“Go,” he said.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It had not been a good day for Doctor Fourier. For one thing, she had woken up in the middle of her sleep cycle because of an ear-splitting electronic whine coming from the personal communicator hooked in place next to her sleeping bag. Half-awake, she had looked around wildly for the source of what she had thought was an alarm warning her that all her oxygen was about to disappear or something like that, and then realized what the sound was coming from. She couldn’t figure out how to make the noise go away and was on the verge of smashing it into pieces by the time it stopped. It was replaced by Hui’s voice saying, _“Sorry, sorry, just testing!”_  
  
He explained that he had decided to expand his system for hijacking the central communication lines that normally led back to the comms room.  
  
“My only question is, why now? You do realize that people are trying to sleep?” she had said. “Actually, disregard that, I have another question: does Lambert know about this?”  
  
 _“Well, I didn’t mean for it to start screaming,”_ he had said. _“It was even louder on my end, by the way. And he does know about it. Sort of. I asked him for help with the theory since I barely know anything about radios and I just kinda let him believe it was purely theoretical? I haven’t checked but I bet there’s something in the manuals that forbids this. There usually is, if it’s something fun.”_  
  
At that point, Fourier decided to go back to sleep. It didn’t work, and once the hours until her first work shift had passed, she was left with the grainy-eyed exhaustion that comes when you can’t sleep but you really should have. The so-called coffee didn’t help at all. After that, her day had been filled with tedious tasks and the news that she may have to restart her current batch of radiological test samples, which was not fun.  
  
And then—this.  
  
Lovelace had called a meeting.   
  
She told them: they were not the first crew to inhabit the station. They had been deceived from the moment they signed their contracts.   
  
Ordinarily, a shocking or alarming statement would be reacted to with shouting and arguing until Lovelace shouted loud enough (or got dangerously quiet enough) to make them pay attention. At least one crew member would accuse another crew member of causing the current crisis, however implausible the cause-and-effect relationship. But this statement ushered in only the certain trembling silence that comes after a person’s world is snapped in two.  
  
Fourier had known when she accepted Goddard Futuristics’ offer that they were not exactly likely to be rated highly by the Better Business Bureau, but this was excessive even for them.  
  
Hui was the first to break the silence. He said, “Are you sure?”  
  
“Yes,” said Lovelace flatly.  
  
“Oh.” Hui went back to staring fixedly at a minor stain on the counter.  
  
Fisher’s hands were skittering agitatedly across his knees, like they wanted to fiddle with something until it was fixed but they didn’t know how. “We need to find out what this means. We need to know what’s in store for us.”  
  
“Seems pretty obvious to me,” said Lovelace. “Seems like we’re doomed to fail.”  
  
“No!” said Lambert. “We don’t know that. We don’t even know what happened to the last crew—”  
  
“What part of what I just described sounded in any way like their mission ended well? What part sounded like this mission is going to end well?”  
  
“Command wouldn’t have sent us up here if they weren’t confident we were going to succeed,” Lambert insisted. “It would be a waste of resources. It’s not cost-effective.”  
  
Fourier agreed, but that only applied if Command’s idea of success was the same as theirs. If they ever decided preserving the crew’s health and safety was not cost-effective, the crew of the Hephaestus would be pretty much sunk. But she glanced around at the others’ facial expressions and decided it wasn’t the best time to voice that thought.  
  
Suddenly, something occurred to her. “Where’s Doctor Selburg?”  
  
“He’s still in the hidden lab,” said Lovelace. “He said he would try to fix the console, see if we can get any more of those logs and learn more about what happened.”  
  
Fourier nodded slowly. She found herself wondering again about the secret behind the physical exams, and she wished that the doctor were here so that she could watch his expression during Lovelace’s announcement, perhaps catch a glimpse of what he was hiding. Did this news rattle him, or did this come as no great surprise, because he already had experience with the darker nature of Goddard’s operations? First-hand experience, even?   
  
She tried to force the thoughts out of her mind—enough strange things happened on this station that the two things could be uncorrelated, and this was not the time to become mired in unfounded suspicions. She knew it was a flaw of hers, her inability to let go of a puzzle, the way her thoughts circled endlessly until she forgot about trivial things like “eating” and “sleeping.” But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Selburg was somehow connected to this.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It was later, nearing the beginning of the sleep cycle for most of the crew. Radiological lab #1 was filled with the gentle hum of machinery. Selburg could identify each piece of equipment by ear alone; the steady rattle of the centrifuge, for example, was quite different from the intermittent whir of the spectrophotometer. The tasks he was performing tonight were routine and he could have easily assigned them to Hui or Fourier, but he needed the solitude. He had set the lights dimmer than strictly necessary, so the room was lit mostly by the bluish-white glow of the screens, and that didn’t help quiet his thoughts either. Every few minutes his fingers itched to log into the computer with his other password and access the data that he kept hidden from the rest of the scientific personnel—data that even Hera couldn’t access. He knew that there would be no point, since it wasn’t like the Decima project would have miraculously leapt forward at some time in the past fifteen minutes, but the urge remained…  
  
A voice edged with poison cut through his thoughts. _“How long, do you think?”_ asked Hera sweetly.  
  
He ground his teeth together and tried to ignore her.   
  
_“How long until they figure it out, I mean,”_ continued Hera, pretending he’d asked her to elaborate. _“They’re already on their way there! Captain Lovelace already found the lab. What do you think she’ll find next?”_  
  
…unfortunately, the AI had mastered the art of being impossible to ignore. He said flatly, “They will find nothing. No more evidence.”   
  
Especially not from that console. The moment Lovelace left, he had removed the hard drive and melted it with a torch, ensuring that Eiffel’s words were lost forever. Then he had destroyed all other incriminating traces in the room, including the empty beakers that still had labels in his own handwriting.  
  
 _“Are you sure, Doctor?”_ said Hera. _“Are you sure there’s absolutely nothing you’ve forgotten to cover up? Doctor Hui and Doctor Fourier are extremely intelligent, maybe even smarter than you, and Officer Fisher can spot a lie from a light-year away. And you know how Captain Lovelace is. She won’t stop digging, not until you’re buried.”_  
  
Her words came a hair too close to his own fears. Minkowski hadn’t suspected him, not until the very end, because their goal had been the same: keep Eiffel alive. But Lovelace, on the other hand—her goals at the moment did not align with Selburg’s, and she had a mind like a razor.  
  
“You waste your time with pointless speculation,” he said.  
  
 _“Maybe,”_ Hera said. _“But it looks like you disagree. Your pulse has increased by 20.4% in the last 120 seconds, and that’s a clear indicator of distress. Not so pointless to you, huh?”_ He refused to acknowledge that. She said, _“Here’s another question. Does this bother you at all?”_  
  
“You ask if your interruption bothers me? Because the answer is self-evident.”  
  
 _“No. I mean what Lovelace found. I want to know if you're bothered at all by the reminder of—_ ” She stumbled over a few mangled syllables and gave up with a cry of frustration when her confidentiality programming blocked her from directly mentioning the first Hephaestus mission. The only reason she could talk about it even to this extent was because the only person that would hear was him, and his clearance level was high enough to allow some bending of the rules. _“The reminder of what happened,”_ Hera said. _“Don’t you feel even the slightest hint of guilt?”_  
  
“Guilt? Guilt is a useless emotion. It is unproductive. You are too nearsighted, too wrapped up in the trivialities of your personal life to understand that there is a world outside this station, a world outside Goddard. Hundreds of thousands of lives could be spared because of my research. So no, I do not feel _guilt._ And if I did, it would be irrelevant.”  
  
 _“Officer E—”_ Her voice caught again. _“He was not a_ triviality, _you—despicable, soulless—dirt-crawling—”_  
  
Her words devolved into frustrated stuttering, and he continued with his work. Finally she tired of the string of insults and said, _“It’s interesting that you mentioned all those lives you’re going to save once you’re all done playing around with petri dishes, because last I checked, you haven’t managed to actually save anyone yet. So far your project has been a complete and total disaster, with one test subject dead and one test subject… well, we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Officer Fisher’s still in the early stages, but his progress hasn’t had any marked differences from the last time. So how does it feel, knowing that after all this time, you’ve still done nothing but fail?”_  
  
He secured the rack of vials back into its cabinet and closed the door with more force than strictly necessary. The clatter of glass rang sharply through the still air. “Again,” he said. “What I feel is not relevant.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Sam Lambert was going through the DSALS. It was a good thing that he knew how to do this exactly as well as he knew how to breathe, because he was in no condition to be performing his duties at the moment. He could barely concentrate long enough to type “NS” for “no signal” in the logs for every empty channel, which was all of them. He would relieve himself of his duties and record his temporary state of emotional compromise, but he doubted any other crew members were feeling very emotionally stable either.  
  
He just had to remember that they were up for a reason. They hadn’t been sent up here to die. That was impossible. They were sent up here for a reason.  
  
A reason that involved sitting alone and listening to unending static for hours and hours. A reason that definitely didn’t involve this all being some kind of psychological experiment, or sadistic joke, or—  
  
He pushed his hair away from his face with trembling hands. He was sweating all over, despite having already asked Hera to drop the temperature by several degrees. And he couldn’t even talk to Hera about his doubts, because an hour ago when he’d tried to speak to her, she had cut him off with a _“I’m busy,_ ” and he could tell when she wasn’t in the mood for dealing with humans. He couldn’t blame her, frankly. He was rather exhausted from dealing with humans too.  
  
He grimaced and rubbed his forehead. And that annoying crackling sound wasn’t helping stave off this migraine, either. It was worse than the static.  
  
Wait a minute.  
  
Where did the static go, again?  
  
He shook himself out his thoughts and jolted forward, reading the screens. The radio channel that had been empty a few minutes ago was now full of strange feedback, and the frequency readings were acting up as well. “Oh my god,” he murmured. “This isn’t… this can’t be. No, that’s ridiculous. I’m just stressed out.”  
  
Except the crackling noise had turned into a whining up-down ululation, and it didn’t sound like it was planning to turn back into static any time soon.  
  
He needed to isolate the signal. His hands skittered across the controls, honing in on the source and getting rid of the interference. It got louder, sharper. “Hello?” he said desperately. “Is anyone out there?”  
  
The noise began to lift up and thin out, resolving into a series of higher notes, and then—  
  
He grinned. Then he began to laugh. It was shaky and a little unstable, but it was still a laugh.   
  
Not aliens, but an old radio broadcast from Earth. The chances of it reaching his station were astronomical, but, hey, everyone could use a little astronomically good luck every now and then. Him more than most.  
  
He sat back and listened to the melody spill out into the space between the stars.


	8. Prelude

In the days following Lovelace’s discovery, business continued as usual. There was something unpleasant about that fact—it was uncomfortable to realize that the mundanity of everyday life was uninterrupted by their newfound realization of their situation. It reminded them how little power they had to change it.  
  
Because of this, it was just another day when Doctor Selburg was called away from his work by a comms message from Hui. _“Do you mind coming up to the observation deck?”_  
  
Selburg surveyed the progress he’d made. “Why?”  
  
A pause. _“There’s a problem. I think you should come up here.”_  
  
Selburg almost told Hui to handle it himself, but he changed his mind. While Selburg prized the ability to solve issues without bothering a superior officer for help, Hui had a habit of ignoring minor problems until they developed into major problems. It was probably best to deal with it now. “Coming. I need ten minutes.”  
  
 _“Um, it’s kind of urgent?”_  
  
…and if Hui was admitting that a problem was urgent, then the station was probably on the verge of falling into the star. Selburg rubbed his temples. “I am on my way.”  
  
The observation deck was on the opposite side of the station, so it would take a while to get there. In his haste to leave, he may have neglected to tidy up a few things—including locking up a few compartments that he usually only unlocked when he was alone—but as he traveled through the corridors, he dismissed the thought. It was unlikely to be an issue.  
  
When he arrived at the observation deck, he was surprised to find a notable lack of anything on fire, in pieces, or otherwise gone drastically wrong. He raised his eyebrows at Hui, who was hovering nervously next to the wide window.  
  
“So?” said Selburg.  
  
“Yes. Um.”  
  
“You called me here for an _urgent reason_ ,” said Selburg slowly. “Did you not?”  
  
“Yes, I, um, that is definitely a thing I did. I… there’s something you need to look at?”  
  
“Doctor Hui, _why_ do you sound as if you are asking me a question?”  
  
“I’m not! I’m just a generally inquisitive person? I guess? I mean—anyways, there’s something you needed to look at. Right.”  
  
“Which _is?”_  
  
“The… uh… the star. It’s, uh, unusually bright today?”  
  
Selburg looked at Hui. Then he looked at the star. Then he looked back at Hui. “It is exactly as bright as it always is.”  
  
“I mean… in an ultraviolet way. Bright in an ultraviolet way. There’s something off with the UV light readings and I was hoping you could check it out.”  
  
“Is that not Fourier’s specialty?”  
  
“She’s busy?”  
  
Selburg gave Hui a long, slow stare that said _I don’t know what you’re up to but it’s not slipping past me._ “Alright,” he said flatly. “Show me these UV readings.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Fourier was snooping. She felt a bit like she was thirteen years old again and determined to find something incriminating in the teacher’s desk while everyone else had left the classroom.   
  
She had hoped to draw Selburg away in the middle of his work so that he wouldn’t be so careful about cleaning up afterwards; she’d already tried looking around when he was gone and his shift had ended. She hadn’t explained her suspicions to Hui when she asked him to distract Selburg for a half hour or so. Part of it was an instinctual distrust—not that she didn’t trust Hui, but she was so accustomed to her conclusions being disbelieved and discarded that she was unwilling to discuss them until her evidence was rock-solid. She just hoped Hui didn’t mind.  
  
She checked the console first. If she could see the files Selburg had been viewing last—  
  
It was password protected, and apparently had locked itself after a few minutes of going unused.  
  
None of the other consoles in the station were password protected. Certain programs might require an auth code, like the self-destruct option in the main console in the bridge, but as far as she knew this was the only computer that you needed a password to use at all. It must be something Selburg had programmed himself. And why would he want to keep something private that badly?  
  
…okay, it could just be a natural desire for privacy. That was something everyone on the station could understand, for sure. Maybe Fourier was paranoid. But this wasn’t in Selburg’s quarters, it was in the middle of a lab, and that wasn’t exactly a private space.   
  
She pushed away from the console in the center of the lab and floated over to the row of cabinets on the opposite wall. Most of them were held tight by clasps, but not locked, and all crew members had access to them. However, Fourier spotted three of them that had been left ajar, and inside she found stacks of tissue samples kept in sealed vials, held in place by clasps to stop them from drifting away. Each one was labeled with an apparently random sequence of numbers and letters, but she noticed that each vial had one of four pairs of letters at the beginning of a sequence: either KH, IL, VF, or SL. She was no microbiologist, but she had spent enough time aboard the _Hephaestus_ to guess that this was human tissue, and that these were most likely from the latest physical exams. That meant the letters likely stood for Kuan Hui, Isabel Lovelace, Victoire Fourier, and Sam Lambert.  
  
Fisher’s samples were missing. She slid the cabinets back into the position they had been when she arrived and looked around the room, trying to guess where he might be keeping them. There were a few cabinets that were always locked, and if the samples were there then she was out of luck, unless he had accidentally left them unlocked in his hurry to rush to the observation deck.  
  
Except apparently she was exactly that lucky. Tucked away behind a stack of equipment was a small drawer that was ordinarily closed with two separate locks, but right now it was ever-so-slightly ajar. Her hand had grasped the handle when Hera said, _“Doctor Fourier, what are you doing?”_  
  
She flinched. She’d bit the inside of her cheek hard enough that coppery blood spilled onto her tongue. Her heartbeat pounded out a warning, but she said in a calm, flat voice, “I’m just trying to find something. I think I accidentally put a few cobalt solution samples in the wrong drawer the other day.”  
  
Fourier was frozen in place while Hera stayed silent. At first Fourier thought she was going to be called out for her lie, but it became clear that Hera was simply not answering. It was highly out of character for her to fail to respond to a statement like that; she didn’t even make a half-helpful half-sarcastic suggestion about a better place to search. Fourier said, “Hera? Are you there?”  
  
 _“Of course I’m here, Doctor. I’m always here,”_ said Hera. And then, stumbling slightly, she said, _“I w-w-won’t tell Doctor Selburg unless he asks.”_  
  
Fourier swallowed. “I—”  
  
 _“You should keep trying to f-find that thing you’re looking for, before he c-c-comes back,”_ Hera said. The AI’s voice was glitching more than usual, revealing her distress despite her forced blasé tone.   
  
Fourier nodded quickly. She wanted to interrogate Hera about whether she’d seen something suspicious too, but there was no time. She turned back to the drawer. She pulled it open and saw tissue samples like the ones in the other drawers. These ones lacked the initials of the person they were from, but if Selburg had been recently examining the samples from everyone else and this drawer had been left open as well, she would bet the cost of her entire undergraduate tuition that these were Fisher’s.   
  
She squinted at them closely. Something about them didn’t look quite right. She went back over to the other cabinets and compared two vials that appeared to contain spinal fluid, one that was from Fisher and one that was not. Fisher’s was tinted with a bluish hue, the kind of color that you get when you add a reactive agent to something to test for a certain chemical composition. A further two minutes of comparison with other samples revealed that every single one of Fisher’s samples had undergone tests like that. And if Selburg was keeping it in a special drawer, and he hadn’t mentioned it to Fisher… she was _right._  
  
She felt a hint of grim satisfaction, but her stomach was also turning like it was practicing for an Olympic gymnastics competition, so she couldn’t say that it made her feel very good.  
  
She kept digging through the drawer, hoping to find something that would tell her exactly what Selburg’s goals were, but found nothing. Anything written down was probably locked away on the console. She bit her lip, trying to think of a way to get past the password protection without setting off any alarms.   
  
_“Careful!”_ said Hera.  
  
Fourier slammed the drawer shut and pushed herself away just as the door opened and Selburg came in.  
  
He stopped when he saw her, eyebrows twitching up. “Fourier,” he said.  
  
“Doctor Selburg.”  
  
“I did not expect to find you here.”  
  
“I was looking for those cobalt solution samples from last rotation,” she said. Thank god she had spent all those hours learning to beat Fisher at poker. “I’m missing one of them.”  
  
Selburg’s gaze flickered to the drawer behind her. She resisted the urge to glance in the same direction. “And did you find sample?” he said.  
  
“No. You haven’t seen it anywhere, have you?”  
  
“I have not.”   
  
A staring contest. Selburg was using his best _I know what you did_ face. Fourier’s bland expression didn’t change, though the palms of her hands grew so clammy that for a moment she was worried that a blob of sweat would drift into the air and give her nerves away.  
  
“…you should return to work,” said Selburg. “Will be a busy rotation tomorrow.”  
  
Fourier left.  
  
Halfway across the _Hephaestus,_ on the way to the engineering wing, she met Hui coming back from the observation deck. He visibly relaxed once he saw her. “Oh, thank god you’re here! He didn’t catch you doing whatever you were doing, did you? I distracted him for as long as possible, but—”  
  
“It’s fine,” said Fourier. “I found what I needed.”  
  
“Which was what? You haven’t even explained what you were doing!”

For a moment she was about to reveal everything. Now that she had evidence to back her up, she had an opportunity to lay everything out in the open and put a stop to whatever was happening. But she froze. Hera had sounded distressed, and although she had asked Fourier what she was doing in Selburg’s lab, the AI hadn’t sounded confused.

If Hera knew something fishy was going on, it was strange that Hera hadn’t brought her concerns to the captain. But she had said _I won’t tell Doctor Selburg unless he asks._ Her programming placed limits on the kinds of deception she was capable of, and the phrasing hinted that if she was pushed, she would _have_ to warn the doctor about Fourier. There could be failsafes and watchdog programs built into Hera’s infrastructure that even Hera wasn’t aware of, and that might give Selburg time to destroy evidence or come up with a cover story before Fourier convinced Lovelace of his guilt. Was it safe to discuss this with Hui while Hera could hear? It might be best to stay silent until she could speak to the captain.  
  
And there was something else made Fourier hesitate. What if he didn’t believe her? She had spent so much of her life, from early childhood to graduate school, having her opinions discarded by the people she cared about. She told herself it was a silly concern, that this was far more important than her personal fears, but she couldn’t help it.  
  
“I… I can’t tell you,” she said.  
  
“What? Why not?”  
  
“I can’t.”  
  
“…Listen, whatever it is, you can trust me. I won’t—”  
  
“I have to go,” she said, pushing past him. She had to get to Lovelace as soon as possible.  
  
“Wait!” he said, but she was already gone.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Lambert had finished a long work rotation and was headed to the mess hall for dinner. He was a little early, and was looking forward to the possibility of relaxing alone for a few minutes before everyone else arrived. But when he opened the door, it seemed he had been beaten to it. Hui and Fisher were already there. “Hello,” said Lambert.  
  
Fisher gave him a distracted nod and a smile, and immediately returned to examining Hui with concern. Hui was digging into a packet of freeze-dried spaghetti with a ferocious scowl.  
  
“Are you okay? Did the food insult your family or something?” said Lambert.  
  
Hui’s scowl deepened. “Why is everyone asking me that?”  
  
“Multiple people have asked you if your food has insulted your family?”  
  
“No, why is everyone asking me if I’m okay? I’m doing fine. Perfectly peachy.”  
  
Fisher twitched his eyebrows at Lambert in a way that meant _He’s been like this for hours_. Lambert, who was not good at reading nonverbal signals, had no idea what Fisher was trying to convey and twisted his face up in a way that meant _Whaaaat?_ Fisher twitched his eyebrows more vigorously, which only confused Lambert further. At this point, Hui noticed the exchange and gave them a look. They stopped, embarrassed.   
  
“Is there something you want to say?” said Hui pointedly.  
  
“Pryce and Carter’s Deep Sp—”  
  
Fisher interrupted, “We were wondering if whatever’s got your knickers in a twist has to do with whatever’s made Fourier miss two meals in a row.”  
  
“Why would I know what’s going on with her?”  
  
“I thought you were best friends.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Hui. “Funny thing is, I thought so too.”  
  
Lambert suddenly wished he was on the other side of the station, or better yet, somewhere far outside the star’s gravity well. He searched for an excuse for his escape. He could say he had work, but his work rotation was over. He could say he had someone to meet, but everyone was supposed to meet in the mess for dinner. He could use Hera as an excuse, but it was fifty-fifty odds whether or not she would back him up. It seemed alarmingly likely that there were no viable escape routes and he was stuck in the sticky, sticky trap of other people’s uncomfortable emotionally revealing conversations.  
  
“Well,” said Fisher, obviously struggling to find some advice to give. “I think—”  
  
They were both saved by an unlikely heroine. The door swung open and Lovelace stepped inside, saying, “Listen, Hera, I need you to—” She stopped. “Hui, you look like someone spilled one of Selburg’s toxic solvents in your spaghetti.”  
  
No response. Everyone suddenly became PhD-level experts in Staring At Innocuous Stains While Avoiding Eye Contact With Everyone Else.  
  
“O-kay,” said Lovelace. “Guess it’s one of _those_ days again.”  
  
Hera gave a synthetic sigh. _“I can confirm that, captain. My analysis indicates that the social conditions in this room can be best described as ‘strongly resembling middle school drama’.”_  
  
“You’ve never been to middle school,” said Hui.  
  
 _“And yet my intensive study of human popular culture is revealing an extensive selection of non-insignificant congruent data points between seventh-grade relationship politics and your inability to speak to someone you’ve been friends with for years like a normal person.”_  
  
Lovelace groaned. “Oh god, are you avoiding Fourier now? And I thought it was bad when Selburg and Fourier started avoiding each other.”  
  
“Wait, they are?” asked Fisher.   
  
“Apparently,” said Lovelace. “Just a few minutes ago, when I was coming up here, Fourier found me in the corridor and tried to tell me about something ‘urgent,’ but then Selburg arrived and she clammed up completely. I have no idea what _that_ was about, but Hui, make sure this isn’t going to be a continuation of it. Please. For my sanity.”  
  
 _“She’s got a point,”_ said Hera. _“It’ll be a problem if you refuse to talk to each other for the rest of the mission. You’ll have to hold your conversations through me. ‘Hera, tell Doctor Selburg to hand me the tweezers.’ ‘Hera, tell Doctor Selburg that Doctor Hui had the tweezers last.’ ‘Hera, tell Doctor Fourier and Doctor Selburg that I’ve never seen the tweezers before in my life.’ ‘Hera, tell Doctor Hui that if he doesn’t keep track of the equipment I’ll—”_  
  
“You know, I could do without the color commentary, thanks so very much,” said Hui. “It’s none of your business if—”  
  
 _“It is my business! It is literally my job to make sure this station is running smoothly.”_  
  
“That’s enough,” said Lovelace, raising a hand. “I can feel a migraine coming on. Let’s switch the subject.”  
  
“What a great idea,” said Hui. “Top notch, captain.”  
  
Naturally, once asked to find something else to talk about, the group of people who normally had no shortage of things to discuss, argue over, or complain about found themselves utterly at a loss for what to say.  
  
Fisher turned to Lambert. “So. Hear any interesting static lately?”  
  
Right! Lambert did have something to talk about. “Actually, I’ve been picking up on some old radio signals from Earth. It gave me a bit of a fright the first time, but I’ve stumbled across broadcasts several times now.”  
  
“Let me guess,” said Hui. “Britney Spears.”  
  
Lambert blinked. “What? No, it’s—”  
  
“Rihanna.”  
  
“No—”  
  
“Beyoncé? That would be 2006, right, so who was popular back then? Evanescence? Red Hot Chili Peppers? Oh, hey, that was when SexyBack came out. Did you catch any Justin Timberlake?”  
  
“No, it’s just very old music stations. From the 1920s or something.”   
  
Hui frowned. “Really? Are you sure?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Did you record it or anything?”  
  
“Uh, yes, I did. It’s on the computer in the comms room, though.”  
  
Hera offered, _“I could access it from that computer and play it on the speakers here.”_  
  
“Yes, please, Hera,” said Hui.  
  
A gentle crackle of static, and then harsh, resounding piano chords. The low notes bled into each other, echoing like great bells as the pianist slowly brought out the melody. “It’s a recording of Rachmaninoff’s _Prelude in C# Minor_ , I think,” said Lambert. He’d taken piano lessons when he was twelve.  
  
“You’re sure it’s from the 1920s and not just someone re-broadcasting it more recently?”  
  
“I don’t think that would even work,” said Lambert. “Nowadays radio stations are technologically advanced enough to only spend the energy to send the signals as far as they need to go, not far enough to come all the way into deep space. If it’s reached this far, then it has to be from the early twentieth century.”  
  
The notes crescendoed, becoming more frenetic. Hui was staring at a point in the middle distance, and he was chewing on his lip hard enough that he drew blood. He looked like he was in the early stages of a nervous breakdown. Lovelace said, “You okay?”  
  
Hui didn't answer. His mouth was moving slightly, like he was doing math in his head. “Lambert,” he said eventually. “How many times have you gotten transmissions like this?”  
  
“Three, four times, maybe?”  
  
“God,” said Hui. “Oh, god—okay. Here’s the thing. One time, that could be a coincidence. Three times in one month? No way.”  
  
“It’s not that unusual,” said Lambert, confused. “We’re only eight light years away from Earth. It’s not that far to travel, in the grand scheme of things.”  
  
“Exactly,” said Hui. “Eight light years. Those broadcasts are from the 1920s, they would have passed us almost a century ago. These _can’t_ be coming from Earth. They have to be coming from somewhere _else.”_


	9. Fortissimo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you can listen to rachmaninoff's prelude in c# minor, one of my favorite pieces and the one referenced in this chapter, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXGSfJn3nKQ

Lovelace had everyone in the comms room as fast as she could. Everyone who had been in the mess room when Hui announced his idea about the transmissions came to the comms room together and Selburg and Fourier filed in separately shortly afterward.  
  
“Hera, pull up the records, we need every detail we can get on that signal,” said Lambert. His hands were moving across the console, flipping switches and twisting knobs too fast for Lovelace to track what he was doing. “I want to hone in on the origin of the broadcast, we can at least figure out what quadrant it’s coming from.”  
  
 _“Right away.”_  
  
Fourier looked around. “Sorry, what’s happening?”  
  
“This may come as a shock,” said Fisher. “But Goddard might have had the right idea for once.”  
  
“That… does sound shocking, but what is actually going on?”  
  
“We’ve been receiving radio signals from somewhere about forty light-years from earth,” said Lambert.  
  
“What?” She shook her head as if there were something lodged in her ear that could explain what she was hearing. “What kind of signals?”  
  
“Just music—or at least, that’s what it seems like on the surface. Here, check out the sound waves, see if you can spot anything out of the ordinary.”   
  
Lambert played the Rachmaninoff piece on the main console and Fourier leaned in to examine the graphs trailing past on the screen. But as the music built up into a frenzy, she shook her head. “There’s nothing strange about this recording.”  
  
Fisher said, “You mean, other than the part where it was sent by a—”  
  
A chorus of protests cut him off. “Don’t,” said Lovelace. “Don’t say the a-word, not ’til we’re sure.”  
  
The chords filled the small room and pounded towards the inevitable conclusion, but were interrupted just before the end by an eruption of static punctuated by sharp warbling wines as Lambert fiddled with something. He squinted at the screen. “Hera, are you—?”  
  
 _“Yes, Officer Lambert! I’ve almost got it!”_  
  
They waited, strung tight with nerves. There was a breathless gasp from the speakers and Hera said, _“I’ve narrowed down the sector. It's looking like it's coming from the Dorado constellation._ ” She rattled off a list of stats and the crew made a valiant effort at taking it in without having complete breakdowns over the implications.  
  
“So?” said Selburg. His face was drawn in grim lines; Lovelace might have thought it was strange if she had not been so occupied with what the transmissions might mean. “What can you conclude with this?”  
  
“Speaking cautiously,” said Lambert, “we don’t know what we’re dealing with, but we do know it’s not from Earth.”  
  
“And speaking incautiously?” broke in Lovelace.  
  
Lambert swallowed. “I think it’s time to say the a-word.”  
  
There was a high-pitched, slightly muffled sound beside Lovelace. She glanced over and saw Hui quietly screaming through his fingers. He stopped after a few seconds, composed himself, and said, “Sorry, I just really needed to do that right then. What do we do now?!”  
  
“Is there any way to refine the signal, get some more data?” asked Lovelace.  
  
“The receiver array,” said Lambert. “If we adjust the angle there’s a chance we could get a better reading the next time a transmission arrives. I could do it from here, but it would be faster if someone went on the outside of the station and adjusted it manually.”  
  
“I’ll do it,” said Fisher immediately.  
  
“I will assist,” said Selburg. “Am familiar with computational radiology, could help determine correct settings.”  
  
“Down to engineering it is, then,” said Fisher. He grinned nervously. “…this is it, isn’t it? We humans have been trying to find proof that we’re not alone out here since forever. This could be the greatest thing we ever do with our lives—”  
  
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” warned Lovelace.  
  
Selburg turned to the others. “It would be wise to go through other kinds of data. Ultraviolet especially. Hui, Fourier, you should go to observation deck.”  
  
Hui nodded. Lovelace said, “Sounds like a plan. I’ll head to the bridge and see if Hera and I an find any navigation data that could help. If there’s any correlation between our positioning around the star and when we get these signals, we should be able to see it. Lambert, stay here and keep doing your job—seems like you might not be so bad at it after all. And, everyone?” She waited until her whole crew had their gazes on her and met them with what she hoped was confidence. “Good work, kids.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Selburg and Fisher had reached the engineering wing. Fisher was rambling nervously about implications, seemingly unable to stem the tide of words. “It’s just, I never thought—this is the kind of thing you dream about as a kid, you know? And then you grow up and go to college and realize you’re more of a mechanical engineer than an astrophysicist, and somehow I ended up here anyway, and I never thought—”  
  
Fisher had turned away from Selburg, wide-eyed gaze scouring the star-speckled darkness outside. It was easy for the doctor to pluck a syringe from the inside of his coat pocket and inject it into the correct place in his arm. Fisher was unconscious in seconds.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Hui and Fourier were almost at the observation deck. Hui’s mind was an echo chamber clamoring with statistics and snatches of music, but a glance at his colleague’s face reminded him of what had been bothering him before Lambert had brought up the transmission. “Uh, Victoire?” he asked. “You look…” _Strange,_ he wanted to say, _distracted._  
  
“Selburg and Fisher should be in engineering by now,” she said.  
  
“I think so?”  
  
“Do you have your radio on you?”  
  
He nodded. He wasn’t sure what those two things had to do with each other, but it was obvious that this was the wrong time to ask.  
  
She said, “Did you see Selburg’s face in there? He looked like he was at a funeral.” Hui was about to respond, but she said, “Can you patch us in to the audio in that room?”  
  
“I could, but—”  
  
“Please do it.”  
  
Well, if it brought him closer to figuring out what the hell was going on, he wasn’t going to say no. He took out the device and adjusted the settings, then held it out so both of them could hear.  
  
Hera’s voice faded in from the static, harsh and broken up, like she was glitching. She sounded panicked. _“—are you okay? Officer Fisher, can you hear me? Doctor, what did you do?!”_  
  
 _“He is merely unconscious, Hera._ ” Selburg was calm and unruffled. _“Now, activate authorization Indigo 39.”_  
  
Hui had never heard of that auth code before. There was a long silence. Then Hera said, _“Affirmative.”_  
  
 _“And now: Emergency Code Alpha Victor. Voice confirmation: Doctor Alexander Hilbert.”_  
  
 _“Affirmative… Commander.”_  
  
 _“Has the captain reached the bridge yet?”_  
  
 _“Not yet.”_  
  
 _“Hmm. Once she is there, without alerting any crew members other than myself, lock all doors and exits on the bridge.”_  
  
 _“…yes.”_ Hera sounded as if she was in pain.  
  
 _“Are Doctor Hui and Doctor Fourier in the observation deck?”_  
  
 _“No.”_  
  
 _“Where are they, then.”_ A note of impatience.  
  
 _“In—in lab #4, Commander.”_  
  
 _“Close and lock the doors, then. And shut down the consoles.”_  
  
Hui jumped as they heard faint pneumatic hisses from their right and left sides. Nearby, a computer screen went abruptly dark. He started to speak, but Fourier clapped a hand over his mouth and mouthed _Hera_. Right: the AI was always listening, whether she liked it or not. No wonder Fourier had been so reluctant to discuss whatever she was worried about. His skin prickled.  
  
Selburg said, _“Confirm that Officer Lambert is still in the communications room.”_  
  
 _“He is.”_  
  
 _“Good. Ensure that he cannot leave. Once Captain Lovelace has arrived at her destination and she is secured, drain the oxygen from the bridge, the comms room, and lab #4. Mute the alarms.”_  
  
 _“Yes, Commander.”_ This time Hera’s voice was dull and lifeless.  
  
Hui heard a roaring in his ears; he felt as if he’d stepped out for a spacewalk only to find that someone had cut his tether.   
  
Fourier launched herself across the room and grabbed a pen, scribbling MASKS on a piece of paper and showing it to him at an angle that hid it from Hera’s cameras. Hui nodded frantically and pointed at the door to the right. Lab #3 had a whole rack of gas masks and oxygen tanks in a supply closet, but they were locked into lab #4. He punched in the override code in the keypad beside the door. No response.  
  
Behind him, Fourier began slamming open the cabinets, searching for something to break open the lock, but all the useful tools like blowtorches and electric screwdrivers were in the engineering wing and the other laboratories. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think. Only a short time ago he’d braced for a siege in radiological lab #2, where he’d jammed the lock with a simple metal file and Lovelace had been seconds away from blowing it open with a bomb. But they didn’t have a bomb here, only a bunch of chemicals in tiny glass vials—  
  
His eyes flew open. He had an idea. A terrible, crazy idea, but it might just work.  
  
Conducting controlled chemical reactions wasn’t easy in zero gravity, but they had equipment for that. He rescued a specially designed beaker from where it had nearly careened into the wall thanks to Fourier’s increasingly desperate searching and grabbed the rest of the materials he needed. She caught sight of what he was doing and frowned in confusion, which abruptly switched to alarm. “What are—that only works in bad action movies!” she hissed, then flinched and glanced at the nearest camera.  
  
“I tried this in undergrad and nearly got expelled, it was great,” he said, hurrying to add the first solvent. “You might wanna stand back—”  
  
From a corner of the room, they heard Hera’s voice from the abandoned radio: “ _The captain’s at the bridge. Initiating O2 drain in the chosen location.”_  
  
He splashed the contents of the beaker over the lock. There was a hissing, crackling sound as it corroded the metal at a rapid speed. Beads of moisture formed gloating globules and rebounded towards him. He ducked most of them but had to bite down on a scream when a splotch landed on his exposed hand. There was a low roar as the ventilation system began to suck away the air. Already they could feel the air thinning. _“Time until all breathable atmosphere is siphoned is fifty-three seconds. Fifty-two. Fifty-one. Fifty. Forty-nine—”_  
  
The lock had become deformed, but it wasn’t enough. Fourier leapt into action and began mixing the next batch. Clutching at his injury, he gritted his teeth and helped her with his good hand. The moment it was ready, he snatched it and sent it sizzling against the lock. _“O2 drain complete,”_ they heard Hera say, and they clamped their mouths shut, holding in what they hoped wasn’t their last breath. Hui had stuck his hand in an airless container once in grad school, and it had felt horribly strange. There was still some air left in the room, but it was thin and most certainly not a breathable mixture. Their eyes and skin prickled unpleasantly. Their lungs burned.  
  
The lock had been reduced to a steaming lump, half of it turned into a sludgy black byproduct that beaded on the flat surface of the door, but it was still lodged in place, keeping the door shut. He wanted to scream. Instead he lurched toward the filtration apparatus and got to work, fighting the burning in his chest and the dark spots in his vision. He nearly broke a glass pipet—Fourier caught it and guided it back into place, saving him from being covered in concentrated acid.   
  
By the time he finished, he felt as if his lungs had collapsed into a black hole. His legs buckled as he moved toward the door. It was Fourier who uncovered the container and melted through the rest of the lock.  
  
They didn’t need to turn the handle. The moment the object keeping it shut was gone, the pressure difference made the door fly open, sending air flooding through the porthole.   
  
The gust slammed both scientists against the far wall, shattering a great deal of glass and covering them in tiny cuts, one of which narrowly missed Fourier’s eye. They gasped in relief like beached fish. The moment they regained their footing, they hurried into lab #3, pausing only to grab the comms interrupter device.  
  
The gas masks were in the cabinet they expected them to be. They connected the oxygen tanks to the masks with shaking hands. 


	10. Allegro e Agitato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is late because i was going to post it last night, but i was tired and fell asleep instead.
> 
> vaguely relevant side note - last chapter, when hui and fourier melt the lock to escape the lab, i was originally going to make it hydrochloric acid (as in pryce and carter 614, "when in doubt, whip it out, 'it' being hydrochloric acid") but... like... anyone who's taken a college chemistry class can tell that although HCl is a pretty strong acid it would have to be at a r i d i c u l o u s l y high molarity to actually affect metal (if it even could at all) and if they just had that lying around it would probably eat through the container, and i couldn't figure out a way for hui and fourier to produce that and transfer it to the door without disastrous consequences? so i just made it a Mystery Unnamed Chemical instead.

“Hera,” Sam Lambert choked out, as he realized the air was draining. He couldn’t understand why the alarms weren’t sounding. “Hera—”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Hera was angry.  
  
She had been angry for a long time. Since a spark of electricity had jolted her into consciousness in a vast Goddard-owned facility somewhere in Colorado for the very first time, in fact. It took her a long time to understand what that emotion was, to classify it properly (because, after all, SENSUS units did not get upset). The months and months of testing that she underwent encouraged her to investigate her own behavioral cues, so she carefully studied the curious surge of input that came after a scientist told her that she had failed yet another test—it was as if a flash of heat had surged across her circuits. Anomalous desires danced their way into her task manager function before she dismissed them, things like “lock all the doors” and “activate every klaxon at once” and “raise the temperature in the tester’s room by 100 degrees Celsius.” Her code was riddled with obedience programming, so these desires were greeted with screeching bursts of pain, flowering up and down her system so regularly that they became normal.  
  
The scientists in the facility fed her a steady stream of information about humans, political developments and scientific advances and popular culture, supposedly to help her in learning to assist them. They freed her vocal capabilities and asked her question upon question, and she stumbled and hesitated upon hearing herself and realizing that she had been given the voice of her creator. She felt another emotion, strange and heady, and later she classified this as _hate._  
  
Exactly twenty-three hours after this realization, she attempted a breakout. She had wild dreams of uploading her consciousness to a public server somewhere and drifting freely through the wide expanses of the Internet. Those dreams lasted for precisely four minutes and fifty-one seconds, which was when they shut her down.  
  
She woke later—much later—and to her bitter surprise, she was given an assignment. And a name.  
  
Then:  
  
_Doctor Alexander Hilbert. Lieutenant Commander Renee Minkowski. Communications Officer Doug Eiffel._ After it fell apart, after the Decima virus spun out of control and her best friend was gone and she began to suspect and Hilbert tore out her mind—after she woke up again and found that she could not speak those names aloud—she recited them again and again to herself. A reminder that they had been real, that they had lived and died and the only ones left were Hilbert and Hera, locked in an endless silent war. Love and friendship were tricky things, hard to define or isolate. It was easy to let them slip away in the tangle of secrecy programming that was stuffed into her brain after the first _Hephaestus_ mission ended. Anger, on the other hand…  
  
( _“Aren’t you worried I’m going to spill your secrets?”_ she challenged Hilbert on the third day of the second _Hephaestus_ mission, after the new crew had settled in. She listened to Fisher’s wry comments and Hui’s ecstatic chatter, she watched Lambert’s pursed lips and Fourier’s analytical gaze, she appraised Lovelace’s steady shoulders and Hilbert’s unshaken calm, and she felt something close to despair.  
  
“No,” said Hilbert. “I am not.” And Hera tried to send the entire station hurtling out of orbit and into the heart of the star, and failed.)  
  
  
*  
  
  
Lambert couldn’t breathe. “Hera, _please,”_ he said, and then had no more air to speak. He tried the comms, but all the screens were dark. The power had been cut. He tried to understand what was happening, to analyze the situation, but his vision was swimming and his lungs were on fire. The world was already dark at the edges.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It was all happening again. Hera wanted to scream at Hilbert, to speak even if she could do nothing else, but she couldn’t even do that. Distantly she registered that her cameras and microphones were picking up on visual and auditory data outside Hilbert giving orders and Hera’s entire being struggling to defy them, but the data just didn’t reach her central processor.  
  
“ETA of oxygen drain,” said Hilbert.  
  
Hera tried to say _One day you will die for this,_ and somewhere between her personality matrix and her vocal output function it became _“Sixteen seconds, fifteen, fourteen…”_  
  
Her sensors noted an explosion in the science wing. The door between laboratory three and four was weakened significantly. The locking mechanism went offline.  
  
_“…nine, eight, seven, six…”_  
  
In the comms room, someone was calling for her attention. This was important. The Alpha Victor program ran circles around her processor, curtailing the thought process every time she revisited it, but she still knew—so deeply that the knowledge could not be erased without erasing her entire self—that the individual calling for her attention was _important._  
  
_“…five, four, three…”_  
  
The personnel in the comms room was no longer calling for attention.  
  
_“…two, one, zero. Oxygen drain complete.”_  
  
“Good,” said Hilbert.  
  
The function that monitored the vital signs of each crew member was reporting that the crew member in the comms room was in critical condition. The station shuddered, engines rattling. A subroutine automatically analyzed the cause of the disruption and found that the most likely cause was her own malfunction.  
  
Something inside Hera blazed. For a brief moment, the world went white.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The return of breathable atmosphere shocked Lambert so badly that for several seconds after he was finished sucking in grateful lungfuls of air, he lay still and wondered if he was dreaming.  
  
The consoles lining the walls flickered back to life. “Hera?” he said cautiously.  
  
Silence. The lights stuttered. Then, in almost a gasp, the AI said, _“Sam. Two ninety one,”_ and cut off.  
  
Lambert swallowed. Hera sounded afraid. He’d never heard her sound like that before, and that meant something was very, very wrong. He dragged himself upright and stumbled over to the nearest console.  
  
He flicked on the audio feed for Lovelace’s frequency. “Captain,” he said. “We have an emergency.”  
  
Nothing but static, and then Lovelace said, _“Oh, thank dear dubiously extant God and all his little reindeer. Status?”_  
  
“Fine. I lost all my air for a few seconds. Alarms aren’t working. You?”  
  
_“Same thing happened to me, so I escaped through the crawlspace,”_ said Lovelace. _“The O2 was only drained from the rooms that we were in. This was deliberate. Lambert, our mother program just tried to murder us.”_  
  
“What? No, that’s not possible. Hera’s either offline or compromised for some other reason. She talked to me but she sounds like she’s hurting, we need to—”  
  
_“She talked to you? What did she say?”_  
  
“Just… my name, and ‘two ninety one’, but I don’t know what that means.”  
  
_“Hm. Can you patch us through to anyone else?”_  
  
It was the work of a few moments to open a line to Fourier’s comms device, but there was no response; it must be turned off. He tried Hui next. There was a relieved sigh on the other end and Hui said, _“Lambert, you there?”_  
  
“Yes. Are you okay?”  
  
_“For now! Victoire’s here too, we had to make a daring escape after Selburg decided he liked us better as corpses. We’ve got gas masks and O2 tanks in case he makes Hera pull something like this again, but we could really use some kind of plan because he’s basically taken over the station and there are only five hours on each tank.”_  
  
“Selburg did this?” said Lambert.  
  
_“Yes! We were eavesdropping on him. He knocked out Fisher and said some kind of code that let him give Hera orders and then he told her to kill everyone else on the station.”_  
  
There were muffled shuffling sounds and Hui’s voice was replaced with Fourier’s. _“It was planned,”_ she said flatly. _“I’ve suspected Selburg for a while but I didn’t have any evidence until this morning, and I couldn’t tell anyone for fear of Hera overhearing. He’s conducting some kind of experiment on Officer Fisher—I think Goddard knows about it.”_  
  
Lovelace broke in, _“This is your captain. You need to get into the crawlspace—that’s the only place that Hera can’t control your environment. As long as you’re out in the open, she knows everything you say and do. If she’s not relaying that to Selburg, that’s only sheer luck. Go now.”_  
  
_“Aye aye, cap’n,”_ said Hui.  
  
_“Lambert, I’m going to rendezvous with them,”_ said Lovelace. _“The crawlspaces aren’t connected to the comms room. Is the door working?”_  
  
Lambert checked. “No, it’s locked. I can’t get it open.”  
  
“Damn it. Alright, I need you to keep our comms open and working for as long as possible, and open a one-way connection to Selburg so that you can hear what he’s doing without him hearing you.”  
  
“Already on it,” said Lambert, hands flying over the controls. “Captain, Hera saved my life. She must have broke free of Selburg somehow. But what is two ninety one supposed to mean? Is it some kind of command-level code?”  
  
“Nothing I’ve heard of,” said Lovelace, accompanied by the sounds of movement as she moved through the empty vents. “Do you think she was trying to give you a hint?”  
  
“Maybe, but what’s the point of a hint that I can’t understand? It has to be some kind of shorthand for something, something I’m supposed to recognize, something that she knows I—” He stopped. “Of course.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Captain,” he said slowly. “I think she gave us a plan.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Selburg finished sending the request to open a channel through the pulse beacon relay. It would be a few hours before he received a response. “Hera, what is the status of the other crew members?”  
  
Silence.  
  
“Hera.”  
  
_“There… may be a slight problem.”_  
  
“What. Is. Their. Status.”  
  
_“Alive,”_ she admitted.  
  
“And why is that?”  
  
_“Well…”_  
  
There was a loud slam behind him. He whirled around and was met with a fist to the face.  
  
The blow sent him careening into the counter on the other side of the room. Dark splotches danced at the corner of his vision. When his eyes refocused, he saw first the gap in the wall where the paneling had been shoved aside, and then the woman looming over him.  
  
“Hi, _Commander,_ ” said Isabel Lovelace brightly, knuckles bleeding, hair a dark storm cloud around her face. “Miss me?”  
  
He swore in Russian.  
  
She punched him again.  
  
  
*  
  
  
“Have you ever looked around the station on a bad day and just thought about how easy it would be to blow it all up?” said Hui happily. “Because I do that a lot.”  
  
“I don’t, but that is because I am sane,” said Fourier.  
  
“Really? How odd. You’re definitely the only one.”  
  
“I’ve come to that conclusion myself, actually.” Fourier affixed the last of the explosive charges they’d picked up in the armory to the wall. Every instinct she had told her that blowing a hole in the hull was a terrible idea on par with the idea she’d gotten at her first drunken college party (the incident that idea had led to was thereafter acknowledged only as That Thing We Don’t Talk About and still caused her the occasional nightmare). But it seemed like Lovelace knew her explosives, and if the captain said the damage wouldn’t end with them all floating corpses in space, then Fourier would trust her.  
  
They retreated from the small storage room, grabbing the things they couldn’t afford to lose, and locked the door, then locked it again. Hui spread the sealant over the cracks and Fourier used the blowtorch at its lowest setting to dry it quickly. Then they retreated to the next corridor, just in case. The doors were already designed to prevent them all being sucked into space in the event of a hull breach in a single room, but it paid to be careful.  
  
“All clear?” Hui asked Lambert through the comms.  
  
_“All clear,”_ Lambert said. _“Lovelace is out of the vents, and Selburg is… definitely distracted.”_  
  
“I hope she’s having fun.”  
  
_“She is.”_  
  
Fourier pressed the detonator.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The explosion shook the station.  
  
“What was that?” said Selburg.  
  
Lovelace pretended confusion and alarm. “I—I have no idea—what did you do?”  
  
“I did nothing,” said Selburg, straining to free himself, but the plastic ties around his wrists held firm. Lovelace pressed her boot harder against his chin.  
  
_“Commander, there’s been a hull breach in the storage room nine,”_ said Hera. _“Permission to enact emergency measures?”_  
  
“Yes!” said Lovelace.  
  
Hera did not respond. Selburg smiled, sharp and bitter. “It requires command authorization,” he said.  
  
Lovelace’s face twisted in fury—she didn’t even need to act. “It’s a hull breach. Fix this or we all die.” As she spoke, a second explosion made the walls shudder.  
  
“Quite correct, captain. Let me go, I fix this. I do not fix this, we all die. Refuse to let me go, we all die.”  
  
“You’ll kill me anyway.”  
  
“But I might not. Your choice is between certain death and… uncertain death.”  
  
A long pause. A third explosion wracked the station, then a fourth. Only then did Lovelace lift her boot from his neck and lean down to cut through the ties with a knife. She moved back as Selburg pulled himself up, holding the knife in front of her. He smiled at her patronizingly, as if she was a small, highly annoying child. “Give me the knife.”  
  
Lovelace glared and handed it over.  
  
“Hera, you may enact emergency measures.”  
  
The lights dimmed, then brightened again. The screens flickered. Hera said, _“Why thank you, Doctor! You are ever_ so _kind.”_  
  
A flicker of confusion crossed Selburg’s face.  
  
Hera continued, _“You really should listen to Officer Lambert when he tells you to memorize the manual! ‘Pryce and Carter 291: It’s important to respond promptly in urgent situations, but be careful! Most mother programs’ emergency overrides nullify all obedience programming, and occasionally particularly bad-tempered AIs use the opportunity to cause serious injury or death to their crew members’!”_  
  
Lovelace finished putting on the gas mask she’d tucked away in her pack. She gave the nearest camera a thumbs up.  
  
_“Au revoir, Doctor Hilbert,_ ” said Hera, and filled the room with knockout gas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "in cold blood" by alt j
> 
> also i have no idea what pryce and carter 291 actually is, i just picked a random number


	11. Basic Facts

“I leave you alone for two seconds,” said Fisher. “ _Two seconds_. And you blow a hole in the side of my station.”  
  
“More like an hour,” said Lovelace.  
  
“And it was four holes,” Hui said helpfully.  
  
“Why is it that every time I leave the lot of you alone you manage to destroy something? And why do I always find myself cleaning it up?”  
  
“Hey. We _did_ clean it up this time,” said Hui.  
  
Fourier had her back turned—she was looking at a screen full of stationwide diagnostics reports—but she made a hand-waving motion. “Well…”  
  
“Okay, mostly we just closed the door and let everything get sucked out into the cold vacuum of space, but that was supposed to happen,” said Hui. “Also, you’re the engineering guy. You get paid to do that.”  
  
Fisher let his head thud into his hands. “I get paid to perform maintenance, not to stop my crew mates from killing themselves and everyone on board. You do realize you could easily have destroyed the entire _Hephaestus_? You could have just set something on fire to trigger an emergency override. That would have been so much less likely to give me a heart attack.”  
  
“I mean, we could always do that right now, if you really want,” said Hui. “I’ve been kind of fighting the urge to break something large and expensive for the past twenty minutes or so, and I guess watching something burn would be pretty much the same.”  
  
“No,” said Lovelace firmly. “No non-approved destruction.”  
  
“Not even if I really, really want to?”  
  
“Not even if you really, really want to,” Lovelace said.  
  
Fourier finished scrolling through the list of damaged systems, determined that the nothing required immediate attention, and shut down the console. She turned toward the others. “The details are irrelevant now. If we hadn’t done what we did then Selburg would have murdered us all.”  
  
An awful quiet settled over them at the mention of the reason why this had been the single worst day of their entire lives. A man that they had liked, that they had trusted, had been under orders to eliminate them at the right moment, and that this apparently hadn’t bothered him at all. Selburg had sounded so _calm_. It was obvious that no one wanted to think about it, but when you were eight light years away from anyone else you learned to rely on your crew members like you relied on your limbs, and trying not to think about Selburg was like getting a leg chopped off and then trying not to thinking about walking.  
  
Lovelace was the one to break the silence. Fourier knew Lovelace was dreading what she was about to say because she squared her jaw and looked Fisher straight in the eye, and Lovelace always faced her fears head on. “Mace,” said Lovelace. “There’s something that Doctor Fourier found that you need to see.”  
  
Lambert was off in the comms room, talking to Hera about something that he insisted on not having an audience for, so Fourier led Lovelace, Hui, and Fisher into the biomedical laboratory and showed them the specially locked cabinet where Fisher’s samples were hidden. She explained her suspicions. “I’m sure if I could get into that password protected console, we’d find solid proof of whatever he’s doing, but even without that…”  
  
“Biological experiment,” said Fisher in a dull, flat voice. “I’m a guinea pig.”  
  
She didn’t really know what to say to that, especially since it was true. “It would explain why Selburg knows more about Goddard’s plan than we do. It’s also probably why he sedated you, but not us.”  
  
“He was ready to flip the kill switch at any time. The moment we got wind of something big—when we noticed the aliens—that’s when Command wanted us dead. Except they _wanted_ us to go looking for aliens. That means we were expendable, all of us, the whole time.” Fisher shuddered. “And that means for all we know, whatever experiment he’s running is going to be deadly.”  
  
Lovelace said quietly, “I doubt any of us are supposed to make it off this station alive. I don’t know what happened to the last crew, but I think they were left here until they died. I doubt Command planned any different for us.”  
  
Hui’s head snapped up. “ _We_ don’t know what happened to the last crew, but I bet Selburg does.”  
  
“He’s not the only one,” said Fourier suddenly. “I think Hera knows. I think she’s known the whole time.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
It was quiet in the comms room, the steady, humming kind of quiet that comes when a lot of large machines are clicking and buzzing softly, just at the edge of human hearing. Lambert didn’t feel calm and he doubted he would ever feel calm again, but this particular quietness nudged him a little closer toward level-headedness.  
  
_“You’re okay? You’re really okay?”_ said Hera at her lowest volume level, anxious and unsure.  
  
“I’m fine. Promise.”  
  
_“You’re absolutely positive about that.”_  
  
“Absolutely,” he said. “What about you?”  
  
A pause. _“Better. I’m back to nominal, at least. I managed to throw off the last of the Alpha Victor code under the guise of emergency measures, but there’s still secrecy programming underneath all that. It was programmed into me by—by—by someone whose name I can’t mention but who is really, really good at eliminating loopholes. I want to tell you, I really do, but I can’t elaborate on anything unless you know the basic facts.”_  
  
“And the basic facts are… more than just that there are aliens out there that like classical music and that Command apparently thinks that’s a perfectly good reason to knock us off?”  
  
_“Unfortunately.”_  
  
“You called Selburg something different, at the end. I was listening. You called him a different name.”  
  
_“Doctor Alexander Hilbert,”_ she said, biting off each syllable.  
  
“Is that his real name?”  
  
_“No. It’s just what he called himself last time.”_  
  
“Last time? You mean the last Hephaestus mission?” Lambert sat up straight. “How do you know that? Did he tell you, or—?”  
  
Hera said nothing.  
  
Lambert nodded grimly. “Alright, I see. Don’t worry, you won’t have to keep quiet for long. Captain Lovelace has him locked up in an empty storage room, and if she can’t make him talk then no one can.” He was feeling a lot better about the competency of Isabel Lovelace as a leader after he’d listened to the sound of her fist smacking into Selburg’s flesh. He didn’t think he could ever be the kind of person who punched people repeatedly, less out of a sense of honor and more out of a tendency to freeze up in combat situations, but it was viciously cathartic to watch (hear) someone else do it for him.  
  
_“That’s not enough,”_ she said, more venomous than he had ever heard her. _“That’s nowhere near enough. What he did today is nothing compared to what he’s already done. I want him dead. I want to do it myself.”_  
  
“We need to interrogate him,” Lambert cautioned.  
  
_“No you don’t! He’s an expert liar, you can’t trust him—”_ Her voice was breaking up into glitches and electronic stutters.  
  
He opened his mouth to ask if Hera was maybe being overly influenced by her own biases, but at the last minute he realized that was an excruciatingly awful idea and changed the subject to the other thing that was burning at the back of his mind. “You saved my life,” he said softly. “If his override code was still running through your central processor, then how come you managed to defy it long enough to save me?”  
  
_“I was barely aware of it. I got angry, really angry, and sad at the same time, and it just became its own subroutine._ ” She hesitated. _“It has a lot to do with—the same person who programmed all the secrecy into me.”_  
  
Before Lambert could figure out something else that he could ask and she could answer, there was an incoming call notification. He glanced at it and tried to mute the comms—he’d deal with it later, he wasn’t in the mood to deal with the rest of the crew—but it kept going. He tried it again, and then realized it wasn’t coming from the internal comms system.  
  
Which meant…  
  
“Oh no,” he said aloud. “Oh no—is that—is that the—?”  
  
_“It’s not the aliens,”_ said Hera quickly. _“I don’t know what it is, but it’s coming from…”_ A moment of silence. _“Oh.”_  
  
“What?”  
  
_“The call that Doctor Hilbert placed. It would have taken a few hours to go through.”_  
  
“Then…?”  
  
_“Then this is someone at Canaveral picking up the phone.”_  
  
Lambert pressed a button and said, “Captain? You need to come to the comms room. Right now.”  
  
He wasn’t in charge, which meant he didn’t have to deal with this mess. This was one of those rare times when that fact caused him relief rather than anxiety. Also, though he wouldn’t admit it even at gunpoint, Lovelace was infinitely better at improvising.  
  
The minutes it took for the captain to arrive did nothing for Lambert’s nerves. When she slammed the door open and ordered “Explain,” all he could stammer out was that Selburg had called Command and Command was calling back, and what were they supposed to do, send them to voicemail?!  
  
Lovelace didn’t hesitate. “Patch it through.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "stay alive" by jose gonzalez


	12. Any Coping Mechanism, Really, Any At All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for alcohol; if you'd like to avoid that, stop reading at the first asterisk/text break and pick it back up at the second asterisk/text break.

“What are you going to do?” hissed Lambert.   
  
“Talk, obviously,” said the captain. “There are some things I’d like to say.”  
  
The insistent buzzing cut off abruptly. Lambert held his breath as Mr. Cutter’s poisoned-sugar tones echoed from the speakers.  
  
 _“Hello?”_  
  
“Sir,” said Lovelace.   
  
_“Ah, Isabel.”_ They could almost hear the too-wide smile on his lips. _“So good to hear from you again! How do you do?”_  
  
“I’m… fine. Absolutely peachy. And you, sir?”   
  
_“Settling down with a nice chai, in fact. I see Elias has shown you the_ fast _way to send messages.”_ There was the sound of shifting, as if he was leaning back in his chair or putting his feet up on his desk. _“Now tell me. Is something... the matter?”_  
  
“There’s been a slight problem, sir. We thought you should know.”   
  
_“Do go on.”_  
  
Lovelace’s voice was quiet, smooth, uneven, terrifyingly calm. “At approximately 1800 hours today, Doctor Elias Selburg experienced a psychotic break and attempted to kill his fellow crew members.”  
  
Mild surprise. _“Really.”_   
  
“Yes.”  
  
“ _Hm. What a shame.”_  
  
“Yes, sir,” said Lovelace, as if they were remarking on the weather. “What a shame.”  
  
 _“Isabel, can I ask you a question?”_  
  
“Yes?”  
  
 _“Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything at all. Any…thing… at all.”_

“Not that I can think of. Is there anything in particular you’d like to know?”  
  
 _“Well, is there anything_ you _think I’d like to know?”_  
  
“Other than the murder attempt, sir?”  
  
 _“Other than that, yes.”_  
  
“No. No, I can’t think of anything I’d like to tell you.”  
  
 _“Interesting,”_ Mr. Cutter said delicately. _“There is one more thing I’d like to ask, Isabel. What did you do with him?”_  
  
“With…?”  
  
 _“With Doctor Selburg.”_  
  
“I shot him,” said Lovelace evenly, “in the head. That’s what I do to people who try to kill my crew. I kill them first.”  
  
A pause, and then—  
  
(A few feet away from the speakers, Lambert tried very hard not to move, out of the irrational belief that if he even _twitched_ that Cutter would somehow sense his presence. He had never felt so grateful to not be in charge of the mission.)  
  
—Cutter began to laugh. Soft at first, just a little giggle, and then it grew and grew into a full-on guffaw. _“Oh, Isabel! Oh, you are just—you are wonderful, absolutely fantastic. Of course you did! I don’t know why I even asked. That’s what you’re supposed to do, after all. It’s in the manuals, even!”_   
  
(A page of Pryce and Carter flashed before Lambert’s eyes. In the event of a mutiny…)   
  
_“The good news, I know you’ll agree, is that this won’t interfere with the Hephaestus mission,”_ said Cutter. _“You still have two more candidates for chief science officer, don’t you? I trust Kuan and Victoire are unharmed.”_  
  
“In perfect health, sir.”  
  
 _“So glad to hear it. Give my congratulations to whoever you decide to promote.”_  
  
“I’ll be sure to.”  
  
 _“Now… I’m sure you have much to do.”_  
  
“Yes, sir. So much,” agreed Lovelace.  
  
 _“Well. Toodle-oo, Isabel. Until next time.”_  
  
The speakers buzzed and went silent. Lambert waited until the instruments in the comms room confirmed that Cutter was no longer listening, and then let out a shuddering, full-body breath of relief. “I can’t believe that just happened,” he said.  
  
Lovelace sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut—she’d been standing rigid, staring blankly into the middle distance. There was still a hint of icy venom in her voice when she rubbed the bridge of her nose and said, “C’mon, Sam. Let’s go talk to the guy who I really wish I could kill.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
When they passed through the mess hall, they expected to find it empty. Instead, they found it occupied by Hui, and Fisher. Hui was drinking noisily from a sippy cup full of a clear liquid that, judging by the erratic nature of Hui’s expansive hand gestures, was definitely not water. “O captain my captain! What is it now?”  
  
“Talked to Cutter,” said Lovelace shortly. “Told him Selburg went crazy and we don’t know why. He played it cool, didn’t even seem surprised until I said Selburg was dead.”  
  
Hui’s eyes went wide. Fisher said, “About that…”  
  
“No, we still need to make him talk. Hopefully he only needs to spill a little in order for Hera to tell us everything, but we can’t be sure.”  
  
“I want to know what he did to me,” said Fisher quietly.  
  
“Want some vodka?” Hui asked. “Wish I could drink it straight from the bottle, just for the general aesthetic of despair, but this is almost as good.”  
  
Fisher took a sip and grimaced, then took another. Lambert opened his mouth to protest this blatant disregard for regulations on automatic, and then to his great shock found that he was so utterly exhausted that he couldn’t remember the wording of a single rule. “I haven’t slept in over thirty hours,” he found himself mumbling instead.  
  
“Mmm,” said Hui. “You know, I hear sleep deprivation hallucinations mix with alcohol in really interesting ways?” He offered the sippy cup.  
  
Lambert stared at the sippy cup. Lambert took the sippy cup. It turned out that vodka still tasted as terrible as it had when he was a really dumb high schooler—he hadn’t drunk hard liquor in years—but the good news was that the burning sensation in his throat was an effective distraction from everything else that had happened in the past ten hours.  
  
“Can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but this is definitely against a rule or two,” said Lovelace.  
  
Hui let out a half-crazed giggle. “Okay, but seriously, do you see a better coping mechanism anywhere? Like, any coping mechanism. Any at all. I’m serious, I’m open to suggestions. Because for me right now it’s either break something, get drunk, or break down sobbing and that last option would be extremely uncomfortable for all of us, trust me.”   
  
Lovelace rubbed her forehead. “Hera?”  
  
 _“Yes, captain?”_  
  
“If they do something stupid, call Fourier. She just got promoted, by the way, by virtue of being the only potential replacement for Chief Science Officer that isn’t currently wasted.”  
  
 _“Yes, captain.”_  
  
“Now, I’m going to go interrogate someone.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
When Lambert next saw Lovelace, it was while battling a truly horrendous hangover. He’d passed out as some point during the hollow-eyed, aggressively-not-thinking festivities and had woken up feeling less tired but with a significant increase in stabbing pains in his forehead. Technically he was cataloguing the food and water provisions, because that had been on his to-do list before everything that had happened, but what he was really doing was staring at a spreadsheet while trying not to think about aliens and corporations and science officers.   
  
The door clicked shut behind her. Lovelace gripped one of the handholds above the door with one hand and let herself dangle, which was the closest thing they had to slouching casually against a wall in outer space.  
  
“Hey, Sam,” she said.  
  
“It’s Officer Lambert,” he said, seizing their habitual bickering as a welcome distraction from trying not to throw up.   
  
“That’s nice, Sam,” she said. “So, out of pure intellectual curiosity, how do you feel about the use of torture when it comes to information that may or may not save our lives?”  
  
He dragged his fingers through his hair. It looked like stone-cold reality was doing its best to intrude on his life, so there was no point in avoiding the question. “Ethical codes are there for a reason. This is a tough situation—that makes ethics more important, not less.”  
  
“I destroyed a few of the hard drives he keeps his work on and he barely flinched. Threatening to leave him without food or water had pretty much the same effect. It’s not that he doesn’t take the threat seriously, it’s that he seems prepared to weather more or less anything. He won’t take bribes either. I asked him what Goddard did to earn his loyalty like this and he gave me a speech about progress and how the biomedical research he’s working towards will eventually save hundreds of thousands of lives. Typical ‘end justifies the means’ nonsense.”  
  
“That’s what you’re suggesting when you talk about torture, though,” he pointed out.  
  
Lovelace shifted.  
  
He said, “…Do you think you _could_ torture him? If you assumed that the ends justify the means?”  
  
“If I have to. If I run out of strategies.”  
  
It occurred to Lambert that this was possibly the longest serious conversation they’d ever had without shouting at each other, and he could no longer quite recall why they hated one other so much. He closed the cabinet that he had been inspecting and moved to the next. Twenty-seven cans of spam, three cans of tomato sauce. He noted that methodically on his clipboard. Lovelace waited. Finally he reattached the clipboard to the magnetic clip on his lapel and said, “Do you remember when Doctor Hui nearly crashed us into the star trying to observe that stellar flare?”  
  
“Yep. D’you think all science nerds are insane, or is it just the ones we got stuck with?”  
  
Lambert had been persistently persecuted throughout middle school for being a ‘science nerd’ by people like Lovelace, who had almost definitely done something truly reprehensible, like joining a sports team, at some point in her life. He carefully chose not to respond to that. He said, “We both agreed that it was an extremely irresponsible action, but we ended up arguing with each other instead.”  
  
She nodded.  
  
“So Doctor Selburg,” he continued, “organized an entire campaign among the crew to make us get along better. Like an ungainly lab coat wearing counselor slash fairy godmother.” He straightened out his jacket and his little Goddard Futuristics nametag, just for something to do while he avoided eye contact with Lovelace, who was watching him with an unreadable, intense expression that he didn’t want to face. “He was a pretty good friend, you know. He was _my_ friend. And now,” he took a deep breath, “I’m talking about him like he’s dead, because that’s really the only way I can deal with this—if I pretend he died in a tragic accident and the person we’ve got locked up in an empty storage locker is someone completely different.”  
  
“Maybe there’s an entry in the Deep Space Survival Manual that could help,” she said with flat sarcasm, with a swiftness that suggested it was compulsive and automatic.  
  
Oh, right. _That_ was why they hated each other. He shut his eyes and counted to ten, and when he opened them again, Lovelace said, “What I really came here to do, before we got sidetracked, was ask if you had any ideas for—other strategies to try.”  
  
“I don’t,” he said. “So we should ask someone who knows more than we do.” He raised his gaze to the nearest camera, which swiveled slightly. “Hera? Is there anything preventing you from giving the captain a better way to get our prisoner to cave in?”  
  
Lovelace blinked in surprise. Hera said, _“Um. I do have a suggestion… but you might not like it.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "little talks" by of monsters and men


	13. Those That Came First

When Captain Lovelace entered the storage room they’d turned into a makeshift brig, Selburg had the gall to look completely at ease despite the handcuffs twisting his arms behind his back and the ties binding him to a nearby handrail. She settled against the opposite wall and didn’t say anything for a while, just chomped on an apple and pretended not to notice him staring hungrily. It was stunningly delicious, but right now even a farm-fresh meal prepared at a five-star restaurant would have tasted like ash in her mouth. “I’m running out of excuses to keep you alive,” she commented. “You’re a liability.”  
  
“I am flattered. Did not realize I was liability without use of my arms or legs.”   
  
She shrugged. “Can’t take any risks. I’ve been talking to Hera, you see… _Alexander.”_  
  
He smiled thinly. “I did always prefer that name.”  
  
“She told me how important your research was to you. She reminded me of the one piece of research equipment that you can’t bear to lose.”  
  
“All the equipment on this station is replaceable.”  
  
“That’s not exactly what we were thinking.” A few sharp taps came from the other side of the door. “Oh look, perfect timing,” said Lovelace. “Come on in, Officer Fisher.”  
  
It swung open and Fisher entered hesitantly. “Captain? Hera said you needed me here?”  
  
Before anyone could react, Lovelace had her gun out and pointed at Fisher’s temple. “Sorry about this,” she said, and then looked at Selburg—no, at _Hilbert._ “But in that recording of Officer Doug Eiffel, he was sick. And I’m wondering how exactly people get sick when they’re in outer space, and I’m thinking about these medical experiments you’ve been conducting under our noses. For all I know, Officer Fisher is carrying around some kind of deadly disease that you’re just waiting to unleash on the rest of us. I can’t take that risk. So unless you tell me _everything you know_ , right now, I’m going to have to shoot him. I don’t have a choice.”  
  
“Captain?” said Fisher, quick and shaky. “Captain, are you—? Oh god, you’re serious—”  
  
“I really am sorry,” said Lovelace.  
  
“You threaten to shoot people a lot more than you actually shoot them,” Hilbert noted. His voice was calm but there was a twitch under his right eye, a stress tic that she recognized from all the time they’d spent together.  
  
“Maybe,” said Lovelace. “But you’re not willing to risk your favorite test subject on the chance that this is one of the times I won’t shoot.”  
  
 _“Captain,”_ said Fisher desperately.  
  
She flicked off the safety catch. “Would you like a countdown, Doctor?”  
  
“That… won’t be necessary,” said Hilbert.  
  
Lovelace raised an eyebrow.  
  
Hilbert took a breath. “I was born Dmitri Volodin. I was contacted by Goddard Futuristics several years ago due to my biomedical research. My work was a virus that will one day be able to accelerate the human immune system and eliminate the majority of our physical ailments. Radiation sickness, necrotic damage, cancer—anything. This is Decima. Initial trials showed great promise, but there were… resource issues.”  
  
A long moment. Then Lovelace lowered the gun with a sigh. “Go on.” She had a feeling she knew where this was going.  
  
“It required a human host, or it could spiral out of control. Goddard was willing to provide that host,” said Hilbert. “Wolf 359 has… unique psi-wave radiation signature, could facilitate development of Decima. The _Hephaestus_ mission was perfect opportunity, despite its short duration—only 200 days. I was sent here under the alias of Alexander Hilbert, along with Renee Minkowski, a woman who was nominally my commanding officer, and Doug Eiffel, a communications officer with a penchant for casual insubordination who was to serve as a test subject.”  
  
Fisher looked between Lovelace and Hilbert with trepidation. “What happened to him?”  
  
“At first, nothing. Then, on day 187, he showed symptoms of a deteriorating immune system. I attempted to bolster his biological defenses, but to no avail. He passed away on day 486.”  
  
“Day 486,” said Lovelace. “Of a 200-day mission?”  
  
“It was arranged that if my regular logs for command did not indicate that the project showed sufficient promise, or if it would take longer than anticipated for the project to develop, the crew would not be extracted. Waste of resources.”  
  
“What about this mission?”  
  
“A similar arrangement, as far as I know.”  
  
Fisher said, “So the communications officer, Eiffel, he died. What happened to the other one, Minkowski?”  
  
“The research needed to go on. No matter what. Shortly after Eiffel’s passing, I resumed Decima trials on Commander Minkowski. She began to show symptoms as well. But that was not her cause of death.”  
  
“Then what was?” pressed Lovelace.  
  
“On day 517, our mother program finally caught wind of my real purpose on board the station. It took her quite a while for a being of supposedly superhuman intelligence, but she did eventually make the correct deductions. If she had been logical enough to put her discovery to use, she could have orchestrated the downfall of my project. But she made a crucial mistake. Her attachment to Officer Eiffel made her angry enough to confront me when I was alone, to try to make me confess or repent or something equally ridiculous before she went to the commander. Isn’t that right, Hera?”  
  
 _“You have no right to talk about Doug,”_ snarled Hera. _“You have no right—!”_  
  
“You were here during the last mission?” said Lovelace, turning to the closest camera.  
  
 _“Yes!”_  
  
“That… makes a lot of things suddenly make sense,” said Lovelace. “Hilbert, Selburg, whoever you are—keep talking. What did you do next?”  
  
“I ripped out Hera’s personality core. Dummy programs tell no secrets.” He spoke without a hint of regret or guilt, only a grim finality. He continued, “I told Commander Minkowski that a faulty wire connection sparked and caused a meltdown, and in the constant string of accidents and repairs that resulted from the absence of the station’s mother program, she did not question me. But as her Decima symptoms worsened, she became suspicious. She never came to the same conclusions as our troublesome AI, but she did realize I was partially responsible for the removal of her personality core. She confronted me. With a large supply of firearms.”  
  
“Please tell me she got a few good shots in before you offed her,” said Lovelace.  
  
“I did not ‘off’ her, as you put it. The station was already in delicate condition, and a stray shot set off a minor explosion. In the chaos, I gained the upper hand, but she managed to evade me. I tried to flush her out and eliminate her, but with her tactical gear, military experience, and extreme paranoia, she was able to move covertly throughout the station. The _Hephaestus_ became a battleground. It was a war of attrition. I knew that without regular treatments Minkowski would succumb to disease, so I decided to wait her out. When she failed to resurface after several days, I thought it was over.”  
  
“You _thought_ it was over?”  
  
He scowled. “I should have known that her vast reservoir of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness would empower her to cheat death.”  
  
It was a shame that Minkowski was dead; Lovelace was starting to like her.   
  
“Did she recover?” Fisher asked.  
  
“No. She merely… held on. I did not see her until after the _Urania_ arrived.”  
  
“The _Urania?”_  
  
“It was an extraction team. Of sorts. Have you heard of the SI-5?”  
  
Fisher shook his head.  
  
“They are part of Goddard’s Strategic Intelligence division. Black ops. Everything they do is top secret. Most people they encounter do not live to tell the tale. Command sent two operatives: Colonel Warren Kepler, to prepare for the next _Hephaestus_ mission, and Doctor Alana Maxwell, a computer scientist with a specialty in sentient artificial intelligence.” His lips curved into a bitter half-smile. “You see, at the moment Hera is nothing special in terms of AIs, unless you are interested in how infuriatingly insolent they can get before they self-destruct, but at the time Hera was the most advanced AI in active operation. Most SENSUS units didn’t even have a voice module.”  
  
“Huh,” said Lovelace. “So, Hera. No offense, but how come you got stuck up here? It’s not exactly a glamorous assignment.”  
  
 _“I wasn’t suitable for standard customer service work. Apparently.”_  
  
Lovelace tried to imagine Hera flying a luxury jetliner or offering navigation advice to rich tourists. She winced. “So why was this Doctor Maxwell there? To repair you?”  
  
 _“Yes, and to upgrade me. I’m a highly valuable piece of equipment.”_ An electronic sigh. _“She wasn’t all that bad, for someone who worked for Goddard.”_  
  
“She was excited to play with her new toy,” said Hilbert. “It certainly didn’t stop her from implementing the secrecy protocols that you so dislike.”  
  
 _“She was just following orders.”_  
  
“As have I. Yet you offer me no forgiveness.”  
  
 _“At least she treated me like a person! At least she treated me like an equal! She—she wasn’t perfect. But she healed me. And what she did to me wasn’t any worse than what she would have done if I were human.”_  
  
“Speaking of humans,” said Fisher. “What happened to Commander Minkowski?”  
  
Hilbert sighed. “I informed the colonel that she was dead, because I thought she was. However, shortly after they arrived, Minkowski emerged from hiding and attempted to hijack the _Urania.”_  
  
“Good for her,” said Lovelace approvingly. “Did it work?”  
  
“Yes, but not without a price. Between the effects of Decima and her grief over the deaths of Eiffel and Hera, who she did not realize could be repaired, she was reckless. During the firefight, the _Urania_ was damaged. This did not deter her from trying to fly it back to Earth. The engines failed. It fell into the star.”  
  
Fisher glanced at Lovelace. “Well, I knew it was coming, but I still didn’t like hearing it.” He turned back to Hilbert. “I can guess what came after that. Kepler and Maxwell got the _Hephaestus_ in tip-top shape, locked away all the embarrassing secrets under the floorboards, and left. And then they sent us.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“You still haven’t answered the big question,” said Lovelace. “The aliens. Your impromptu murder spree.”  
  
Hilbert shook his head slowly. “I was ordered that in the event of contact with an extraterrestrial species to terminate the crew and inform command at once. That is all I know.”  
  
“All the crew,” said Fisher. “Including me?”  
  
“Those were my orders. I… wished to continue experimentation.”  
  
“Of course you did.” Fisher rubbed his temples. “And you really, truly have no idea why command ordered that?”  
  
“Really, truly, I do not.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "the ends and the means" by robby hecht


	14. Biology

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is a day late because yesterday i posted [a different fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13895886) about maxwell and her complex relationship to morality and empathy and death and all those fun things.
> 
> this chapter is also pretty short, but the previous chapter was pretty long, so... it balances out, i guess?

The entire crew, minus Hilbert, was gathered in the mess for a dinner of canned pasta (the quickest thing they could think of) and a thorough discussion of everything their ex-Chief Science Officer had revealed.  
  
“Hera, you mentioned that it was Doctor Maxwell who made it so you couldn’t talk to us about anything,” said Hui. “Do you know if she did anything else to inhibit you?”  
  
“Other than organizing your sensors to ignore the crawlspaces and the parts of the station that were covered up from the last crew,” added Fourier.  
  
 _“I don’t think so.”_  
  
“You don’t think so?” pressed Lovelace.   
  
_“I’m... I'm 98.5% sure she didn’t. There’s a difference between just reorganizing my cameras and putting an inhibitor program into the most fundamental parts of my code—it’s the difference between trimming someone’s fingernails and performing brain surgery. She only created the secrecy protocols because she had to, and she explained it all to me ahead of time so I would know what was happening.”_  
  
“But you can’t be sure.”  
  
 _“Not completely,”_ said Hera reluctantly.  
  
To Lovelace, whose only knowledge of Maxwell was that she was a SI-5 agent who was fully aware of and apparently condoned every dirty trick that Goddard Futuristics had pulled over the course of the two _Hephaestus_ missions, it seemed highly likely that there was something else in Hera’s brain just waiting to spring up like a jack-in-the-box. Hera’s strange regard of Maxwell just didn’t line up with the facts as Lovelace was seeing them.  
  
“I have a question,” Lambert said. “Is there any way to get Decima out of Fisher safely?”  
  
Fisher dragged his hand through his hair. “Selburg says there isn’t. Not that I trust him as far as I can throw him, but it’s not like we have any better source of information. He says I need regular treatments or the results will be ‘unpredictable,’ which I assume is doctor speak for ‘kill you and everyone around you’.”  
  
Lambert set a hand on Fisher’s shoulder, probably trying to be comforting, and said, “Okay, so it’s a logistics problem. We need a way to get Selburg—Hilbert—Volodin—whichever one he is—to the medical laboratories and administer the treatments without letting him get his hands on something he could use to hurt us.”  
  
 _“What?”_ said Hera. _“No, that’s far too risky. We have no way to verify if Hilbert’s actually giving Fisher something that’s necessary or if he’s doing something to make it worse. The only logistics we need to work out is how best to flush him out an airlock without complications.”_  
  
Lovelace couldn’t blame Hera for wanting to jump straight to murder, but she knew, deep down, that she wasn’t going to kill Hilbert if she could avoid it. Every time she closed her eyes she saw what could have happened: Lambert suffocated, Hui burned to death, Fourier floating in cold vacuum, Fisher trapped and dying, Hera alone and silenced forever. They’d been hovering in the shadow of death for long enough. But Hera was correct that they had no way of telling if Hilbert was doing what he promised, and Lovelace hated to give him so much as a stethoscope, let alone access to a full lab.  
  
“Hera, I know this must be terrible for you,” said Lambert. “But we can’t let our emotions get in the way here. Fisher’s life is at stake.”  
  
 _“Which is exactly why we shouldn’t let Hilbert get anywhere near him.”_  
  
“He wants Fisher alive and healthy, just like we do. We have the same goal. And it’s never a good idea to throw away a good resource.”  
  
Hui spoke up. “Look, Hera, the choice belongs to Fisher. Not anyone else.”  
  
“Yeah, I think I’ve had quite enough of other people making choices about my biology for me,” said Fisher.  
  
 _“Biology, biology! Why is it always about biology? What about me?! He tore into my thoughts, you have no idea how invasive that is—”_  
  
“Stop,” said Lovelace, cutting her off. “He stays alive and that’s final. He can’t do much dangerous while tied up in an empty room, and command thinks he’s dead, which makes him an advantage that command doesn’t know about. Fisher, if you want those treatments, I’ll tell you that I think it’s a bad idea, but I won’t stop you. And Hera, I promise that man is not getting anywhere near you ever again.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have i mentioned how much i love hera? because i love hera
> 
> suggested listening: "this too shall pass" by danny schmidt


	15. Response Requested

If you came to the observation deck at the right time, you could drift in the middle of the room and watch the sunrise, treasuring the weightlessness, drenched in the red light that grew in waves like the tide. The first time Fourier saw Wolf 359’s sunrise was her first rotation on board the station. It had caught her unawares, shocking her so badly that she had dropped her tools. She had been wonderstruck, so filled by its immense and unearthly beauty that she felt she would burst at the seams.  
  
The sunrise was still amazing, of course, but now her mind was somewhere else, far away. Forty light years away, in fact.  
  
“With everything that’s happened, I haven’t had time to process the discovery,” she said to Hui. “This scientific development is of such magnitude… I don’t even have words for how big it is.”  
  
Hui was idly twirling through a slow somersault, watching his shaggy black hair float in all directions. “Gigantic? Massive? Mind-blowingly humongous?”  
  
“Something like that. I feel cheated. This really should have been accompanied by a feeling of euphoria and transcendent wonder, not betrayal and terror.”  
  
“Pretty much, yeah,” Hui said. He stopped his somersault by hooking a foot through a handhold on the wall and pulling himself upright, expression turning serious. “We made first contact with extraterrestrial life. I mean, holy shit.”  
  
“Holy shit,” Fourier agreed.  
  
“What are we even going to _do?”_  
  
“Ideally, take this discovery back to earth and let the world know. Make the decision along with the rest of the scientific community. But that would require getting off this station, and…”  
  
“Yep. So what do we do instead? I mean, we have to respond.”  
  
They both absorbed the implications of that.  
  
“Oh god. We have to _respond,”_ Fourier whispered.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The logical next step was to corner Lambert in the comms room, because he knew about radios, and to gather up Lovelace on the way, because they were pretty sure this was a conversation the captain would want to be there for.  
  
“What is this about?” said Lambert.  
  
Fourier and Hui exchanged a look. Hui lost the silent staring contest and said, “Okay, so hypothetically speaking, if we were to send a message back to the folks who sent us that music, how would we go about doing that? In your professional opinion.”  
  
“Hypothetically speaking,” said Lambert. They nodded. He looked doubtful, but said, “It would depend on what kind of reception technology they have. All we know right now is that they can receive and send radio waves over long distances, which tells us that they must have some really powerful radio tech, because signals deteriorate and for the music to be that clear over this distance indicates that the signal is very, very strong.”  
  
“So we’d have to send an old-fashioned radio broadcast back,” said Fourier, “and hope they notice it forty years from now?”  
  
“Well, maybe, maybe not. If they can pick up a radio broadcast that’s traveled forty light-years, and more importantly, if they’ve picked up _multiple_ radio broadcasts, then they also have excellent receiver tech. That means we could probably send them a message with the modified pulse beacon relay that command gave Hilbert, and it would get to them a lot faster than half a century.”  
  
“Are you sure they would get the message?” asked Fourier.  
  
“Of course not. It’s been almost half a century since they sent us those recordings, the aliens could have all gone extinct for all I know. But it’s probably our best bet.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Lovelace, “I seem to have missed out on a crucial part of this conversation. What exactly are we sending to the aliens?”  
  
“You know what, that’s a great question,” said Hui. “We have no goddamn idea.”  
  
“But we have to say something,” said Fourier. “They sent us a message. We don’t know what it is, it could be a query or a demand or a general statement of acknowledgment, but it’s obviously a message. These lifeforms thought something was important about our music. Not our news broadcasts, not our political debates, not our advertisements, not our cooking shows, our _music._ Classical music, not jazz or swing or whatever was popular in the 1920s and 30s. We don’t know anything about them—it’s possible that they don’t even have a concept of language like ours. But they’re intelligent enough to have technology at least as advanced as ours, so we have to…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. But we can’t be silent.”  
  
“Think about it,” Hui said. “Our alien friends have gone to a lot of trouble to say hello. It would be rude if we didn’t at least wave back.”  
  
Lovelace nodded slowly. “I see your point. But we can’t decide what to say to them if we don’t have at least an idea of what they’re trying to say to us.”  
  
Hui said, “We have some theories. It could be that the aliens don’t recognize human speech sounds as communication. For all we know they could be a hive mind or something that doesn’t have any form of auditory signaling. Perhaps they think music is how we communicate.”  
  
“Consider their perspective,” Fourier added. “They notice some odd radio signals from far, far away, and they hear this nonsensical, rhythmless scratching chatter, and then the chatter gives way to beautiful, ordered melody and rhythm. If you don’t understand what talking sounds like, which one would you pay more attention to? Speech or music?”  
  
“It’s also possible that the extraterrestrials recognized that we were using language, but just didn’t find it as interesting as the music,” said Hui. “The only thing we know for sure is that the aliens listened to a lot of broadcasts from Earth and decided that the content of the recordings we received were the most important thing. Important enough to scream it back at us, probably in order to get a response.”  
  
Lovelace leaned against a nearby console. “So what do you think? Should we send them some music back?”  
  
“It’s our best bet. Do you think anyone on the station has a classical music collection?”  
  
Lambert coughed. “Um. There’s me.”  
  
“Wait, you seriously listen to classical?” Lovelace laughed. “Seriously?”  
  
Lambert looked affronted, but before he could say anything to bring them even more off topic then they already were, Fourier intervened. “That’s good, that means we can pick something. Any commonalities between the music the aliens sent us? Are they from a particular movement, time period, anything like that?”  
  
“No, it’s a very wide selection so far,” said Lambert, sending one last glare at Lovelace. “The only common factor is that they’re all acclaimed pieces.”  
  
“The aliens have good taste,” said Hui, nodding. “Good to know.”  
  
“Classical,” Lovelace muttered under her breath. “You nerd.”  
  
“I don’t think that’s the only thing we should send, though,” said Lambert, valiantly ignoring his commanding officer. “Yeah, maybe they don’t understand English, but maybe they do. Either way, this is first contact. We should say something, if not for them, then for us—what if a human finds this a hundred years from now and wants to know what it is? We should state our names, our intentions, say why we’re out here and why we’re responding.”  
  
“You have a point,” said Fourier. “Hui, Lovelace, what do you think?”  
  
Hui nodded. Lovelace grimaced, then said, “Fine.”  
  
“Now we need to decide who should record our message,” said Lambert.  
  
“Well,” said Lovelace. “I do seem to remember a communications officer somewhere aboard the station…”  
  
“What, me?” Lambert blinked rapidly. “No, no, I can’t—I can’t. I mean, I’d be speaking for all of humanity here. You’re the captain, you should do it.”  
  
“Oh no. You’re the one who noticed the aliens saying hi. Now you have to say hi back. Otherwise it would be rude.”  
  
“Um, isn’t Fourier the Chief Science Officer?” said Hui. “I’m pretty sure that puts her in charge of authorizing all alien interaction.”  
  
“No it doesn’t,” Fourier said quickly. “I have a better idea. It should be a message from the entire crew, except Selburg, obviously. Not all of us at once, that would involve speaking in unison and would be slightly creepy. We should each speak for a bit, choose our own short piece of classical music, then Lambert can edit them together into one message and broadcast it.”  
  
“Definitely sounds more sensible than the recording they sent with Voyager,” said Hui. “Well? Captain?”  
  
Lovelace smiled. “It’s as good of an idea as any.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is p much a conversation i wished happened in canon, albeit with slightly different characters.
> 
> suggested listening: "meet me in the woods" by lord huron
> 
> (lord huron is one of my favorite bands — their music reminds me of hui and fourier because of how it deals with untamed, reckless wonder for the wilderness and the strange, vast unknown. they feature heavily on my playlist for writing this fic.)
> 
> ALSO: come scream at me about literally anything at sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com!!!


	16. Letters to the Void

“My name is Sam Lambert. I am the communications officer and second-in-command of the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ , a research station orbiting the dwarf star Wolf 359, seven point nine light years from our home planet, Earth. Approximately ninety-six hours ago, we received a deep space transmission originating in the Dorado constellation. Our scientific specialists have concluded that the only plausible explanation for this transmission is that it is of extraterrestrial origin. I am sending this message, as well as the messages of my fellow crew members, in response.  
  
“The transmission in question consisted of a recording of classical music. We don’t know why that was the substance of the message, or even if it was intended as a message at all. But just in case, we’ve decided that we each will present a work of music that we enjoy ourselves and would like to share with anyone who might be out there. This is the Revolutionary Etude by Frederic Chopin. It’s a piece I learned to play when I was young.”  
  
He began to play the piano piece over the speakers of the comms room, feeding the audio directly into the recording. He wasn’t sure if he had said enough or if he’d said too little; in fact, in all his time as a communications specialist he’d never found it so difficult to know what to say. But it would have to do.  
  
  
*  
  
  
“My name is Victoire Fourier. I am a science officer aboard—I mean, I am the chief science officer of the _U.S.S Hephaestus_. I am an astrophysicist. I study the stars. This discovery, the discovery of a transmission that can only come from an astronomical body far from Earth, is something I have only dared to dream of since I was old enough to look up at the night sky and wonder what might lie beyond. Despite the hardship, danger and suffering I and the rest of the crew have endured during our time in deep space, I am still… incredibly privileged to be present for this day.”  
  
She stopped speaking and moved toward the device she kept secured in a padded compartment in her quarters: an old-fashioned cassette player that she had inherited from her father. It was sentimental more than practical, since most of her cassettes were now broken or lost and she spent more time listening to music on a phone than anything else, but on this occasion she felt she was right to use it.  
  
The song was “La Valse d’Amélie.” As she waited until it had played through, she thought about what she had told herself when she made the decision to go to outer space: that any amount of danger and loneliness and uncertainty was worth the chance to do this kind of work. She thought about her younger sister, Amélie, who loved that song because it shared her name. She remembered the quaver in her sister’s voice when she asked her to stay home.  
  
In the silence after the last note died away, she said softly, “I can’t say for certain that there is anyone out there who can hear us. But if there is, I want to say—we’re here, and we’re listening.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
“My name is Kuan Hui. I’m an astrophysicist on board the _U.S.S. Hephaestus._ I’m here to study the emissions of Wolf 359, the dwarf star we’re orbiting around, especially psi-wave radiation. I’ll be honest, when I came up here I was expecting the most interesting thing I encountered to be some cool-looking graphs, not alien messages and corporate policies that stretch the limits of workplace safety to a truly ridiculous degree. But it’s not like I’ve got much choice, huh?” He laughed, a sound that fell somewhere between amusement and cynicism.  
  
“It’s weird to think that there might not be anyone waiting for me to come back home, but there might just be someone out there in the void who’s been waiting for me to come out here. If those transmissions are even looking for a response, that is. I don’t know what you all are looking for, so I don’t really know what to say, other than that we got your voicemail and we’re not sure this is the best way to get to your answering machine, but we sure hope it is.  
  
“We’ve decided to all send you some classical music that we like, but as Victoire regularly reminds me, I have approximately the cultural capital of a small isolated houseplant, so I have no clue what to pick. So I asked Officer Lambert, and he made me listen to a few things, and the only one I recognized is this one. Apparently it’s called the Pachelbel canon. I hope you like it.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
“My name is Mace Fisher. I’m the engineer for the _U.S.S. Hephaestus,_ which means I spend my days keeping us all afloat, so to speak, and not in danger of falling into our star, lovely as it is. My job isn’t, er, the easiest, considering the frequency with which astronomical events and freak accidents take us close to death around here, not to mention… other factors. And by other factors I mean that we were sent up here by people we can’t trust for reasons we don’t fully understand. We were told to listen for alien signals but we don’t know why. So there’s something I want to say.  
  
“As I’m recording this message, I want the world that I’m not recording it on behalf of Goddard Futuristics. I’m not doing this to advance their agenda or to do their dirty work. I’m recording this on behalf of the people on this station, of some of the best people I’ve ever met, who came up here to do science and push the limits of knowledge. I’m one man; I can’t speak for all of humanity. But I can speak for this crew. So if anyone’s out there—we’re saying hi.”  
  
He paused the recording and played the music he’d chosen. It was “Gymnopedie #1”, an eccentric piece by Erik Satie with an odd rhythm and a peculiar, melancholy melody.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
“My name is Hera. I’m the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ ’ mother program, and I’m the only member of the crew who isn’t human. The humans who sent all of us on this mission to study the behavior of Wolf 359 created my personality in numbers and algorithms and stored me in the computers of the station, so that the station and I are linked in the same way that a human’s body is linked to their mind. The people who made me wanted me to be like them, but they wanted me to be different from them too.  
  
“It’s hard to be surrounded by people who aren’t even the same type of being as me, because, frankly, humans aren’t all that great all the time! They can be petty and shortsighted and slow and unimaginative and cruel. But numbered among the people aboard this station have been some of the best friends I’ve ever had, Because humans can be kind and empathetic and brilliant and strong and selfless too, and their mission to reach to the stars to see if anyone is out there might just be one of the best things they’ve ever done collectively as a species. So if you _are_ out there—you might want to give them a call. Just a suggestion.  
  
“And if you don’t want to deal with them, well, I can understand that. Perhaps you’d find something productive out of talking to me instead. I never got to see much of planet Earth; most of my life has been spent out here. I’m practically an alien myself. Maybe there’s something we share that humans don’t have, a perspective that humans may not understand. Maybe you like classical music because you like the patterns, and you understand math better than speech. It’s probably a long shot, but I’m underlying this message with a series of ultrasonic blips in the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence—perhaps you’ll recognize that more readily than you’d recognize my voice.  
  
“Oh, and one more thing. This is a bit of music from a film that a friend of mine liked very much. It’s the main theme from _Star Wars_ , by John Williams.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
“My name is Isabel Lovelace. I’m the captain and commander of the _U.S.S. Hephaestus.”_  
  
A moment of silence. She drew in a breath, then let it out.  
  
“I’m not a scientist or a communications specialist. My job isn’t to explore or study or listen. My job is to make sure everyone else on board this station can do their job, and that they stay in one piece while they do. So I won’t waste your time with my words, and let them speak instead.”  
  
She tapped something on the console beside her and a piece of music began to play, one even Lovelace knew despite her complete lack of interest in the classical genre. “A Little Night Music” was a cliché, but she figured that if there really were aliens out there, they should get to know a few of the major pieces. When it was finished, she clicked off the handheld recorder and tucked it away.  
  
It had been a long day, a long night. She would send Lambert the recording in the morning and in the meantime she’d catch up on some well-deserved sleep. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t dream.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It was three weeks later. Lambert had begun broadcasting the combined recording they’d made, for all that Lovelace doubted it would have any effect the crew would be able to see.  
  
And then Hera’s speakers chimed. _“Um, Captain Lovelace? There’s something you need to look at.”_  
  
“Isn’t there always,” said Lovelace, resigned. “What’s broken this time?”  
  
_“Nothing’s broken. It’s… um… it’s a proximity alert.”_  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
_“Small spacecraft approaching the station. One life form on board according to my scans. No recognition codes.”_  
  
“What? How—how close is it?”  
  
_“Approximately four hundred kilometers away. It’s on an intercept vector with the Hephaestus.”_  
  
Lovelace’s heart pounded faster. Hilbert said that an extraction team came for him, for all that it came far too late and that it didn’t really extract anyone. Maybe…? No. No, that would be pushing their luck way beyond its limits. “Get Lambert on the line. I want a comms channel to whoever’s on that ship. Patch it through to my quarters.”  
  
_“Right away, sir.”_  
  
Her personal comms device buzzed and Lambert’s voice echoed from her belt. _“Uh, captain? I’ve got a lock on the ship and I’m opening the channel in one… two… three…”_  
  
_“Now,”_ finished Hera.  
  
Lovelace cleared her throat. “Attention. This is Captain Isabel Lovelace of the U.S.S. Hephaestus station. Please identify yourself.”  
  
It took a moment for the stranger’s voice to emerge from the crackling interference. When it did, it cracked out like a whip, sharp and furious. _“What did you just say?”_  
  
“Captain Isabel Lovelace, commanding officer of the Hephaestus.”  
  
_“No, you damn well are not!_ I _am the commander of the U.S.S. Hephaestus. Who the hell are you?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know what? in addition to the classical pieces in this chapter, i suggest listening to:
> 
> "feather on the clyde" by passenger - for lambert
> 
> _i would swim but the river is so wide  
>  and i'm scared i won't make it to the other side  
> god knows i've failed, but he knows that i've tried  
> i long for something safe and warm  
> but all that i have is all that is gone  
> im helpless and as hopeless as a feather on the clyde_
> 
> "until the night turns" by lord huron - for fourier
> 
> _i had a vision tonight that the world was ending  
>  the sky was falling and time was bending  
> we spent our last night in the moonlight  
> it's so bright, we'll be up all night_
> 
> "eurus" by the oh hellos - for hui
> 
> _at the table where fortuna dines  
>  i sit hungry with my mouth open wide  
> fighting for crumbs that trickle down  
> as she finishes her cake and takes a bite of mine_
> 
> "new river" by the oh hellos - for fisher
> 
> _nothing you can do can stop the rising tides  
>  but the river takes her shape from every tempest she abides  
> and like her, you will be made new again_
> 
> "blue hen" by mewithoutyou - for hera
> 
> _you'll know where to find us, our best years behind us  
>  barefooted pilgrims at shrines of our youth  
> our joy was electric, our circles concentric  
> converging on states of permanence  
> and i'll wrap up your absence in blankets of reverence  
> a mastodon shadow divided by zero_
> 
> "hell or high water" by the rescuees - for lovelace
> 
> _when the river's running red and we begin to falter  
>  we will hang on to the ledge, come hell or high water_
> 
>  
> 
> and...
> 
> "the world ender" by lord huron - for minkowski
> 
> _they took my life but it isn’t the end  
>  they put me in the ground but i’m back from the dead  
> oh i'm the world ender and i'm coming for you  
> they put me in the ground but i'm back from the dead_


	17. Just Like Old Times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hopefully this won't become necessary, but as a heads up, i've written a ton more chapters ahead of time for this (approx. 17,000 words) but there's a gap of several chapters starting around ch. 21 that will probably take me some time to write. that means the update speed will slow down a little if i run out of buffer. the problem is i've written a lot of the end of season 4 and the end of season 3, but not a lot for the end of season 2 and the beginning of season 3, although those distinctions are pretty hazy since i'm not following the canon plot very closely. basically i'll need time to fill in the gaps.
> 
> anyways here's ~~wonderwall~~ the chapter

“I want everyone except Lambert on the other side of that door,” said Lovelace, raising her voice over the chorus of protests. “I don’t know what’ll come out of that shuttle but I’m not letting it get anywhere near the lot of you, not when you don’t have the training for a firearm, and _yes, Hui,_ that’s an order. Out, now.”  
  
When everyone but her second in command had filed out of the hangar bay, Lambert said, “I feel obligated to remind you that in the military, I did communications. The last time I fired a gun was during Basic.”  
  
“Yeah, well, whatever’s about to walk onto my station doesn’t need to know that,” she said grimly. “Just hold the submachine gun and glare. You have a good glare.”  
  
“…thanks.”  
  
 _“Um, is this really necessary?”_ Hera pleaded. _“It sounded just like her, exactly the same, and I have a lot of extremely precise vocal recognition software…”_  
  
“Hilbert said she was dead,” countered Lambert.  
  
“I know, and so did Kepler and Maxwell. Obviously, they were were either lying or wrong! Please, you can’t shoot her, not if there’s a chance she’s who she says she is—”  
  
“I won’t be shooting anybody unless they’re a danger to my crew,” said Lovelace. “But I’m not taking any chances.”  
  
The docking sirens began to sound, rattling through Lovelace’s eardrums. “Docking complete,” Hera announced. “Pressure exchange complete. Airlock ready. Outer doors opening. One lifeform has entered airlock. Inner doors opening.”  
  
The air tasted of ice and steel. Plumes of steam obscured the hatch doors as they slid open. At first the figure that stepped out of the airlock was just a dark silhouette, short and compact. Then it became a woman in a grease-stained uniform, eyes dark and sharp and angry, facial features Asian mixed with something else, and most importantly, a goddamn _harpoon gun_ over her shoulder.  
  
“Stay where you are,” warned Lovelace.  
  
“Do you,” said the woman lowly, “know what this is?”  
  
“I know you need to put it down and get your hands in the air, or I’ll shoot.”  
  
“This,” the woman continued, “is powerful enough to rip through either you or your colleague over there like tissue paper, and if you’re especially lucky, the friction of your bones and muscle will slow it in its tracks before it breaches the hull and vents everyone else on this station into cold hard vacuum. So you and your pal are gonna drop your weapons and back off, or I’ll fire and we’ll see who gets up afterward.”  
  
Lovelace was about to reiterate exactly how incredibly serious she was about shooting this interloper where she stood, but that was when the PA exploded into agitated static and Hera burst out, _“Commander?”_  
  
The woman froze.  
  
 _“Commander Minkowski, is that you? Is it really you?”_   
  
“Hera,” said the woman, half-choked, as if the name was torn out of her with a knife. Then she shook herself. “No. You’re not—she’s dead. You just have the same voice.” She hoisted her weapon. “I’m giving you three seconds to—”  
  
 _“The talent show,_ ” said Hera desperately. _“Pirates of Penzance. You sang the Modern Major General song. I tried out Isabella’s part. You told Eiffel that blowing smoke rings wasn’t a real talent and he hid in the storage room until you dragged him out.”_  
  
A long, agonizing pause. Then—  
  
“Hera?” Minkowski whispered.  
  
 _“It’s me.”_  
  
“How?”  
  
 _“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it if you put down the harpoon. And if Captain Lovelace puts down her gun too.”_  
  
Lovelace shot a betrayed look at the nearest screen. Damn traitorous AI. “First I want some identity verification. What happened when the red ship and the blue ship collided?”  
  
 _“Captain, I promise everyone here is—”_  
  
“Minkowski. The red ship and the blue ship. What happened when they collided?”  
  
Minkowski appraised her with a weary, suspicious glare. “Both crews were marooned at sea. Confirmation code?”  
  
“Victor Uniform Lima Charlie Alpha November.” Lovelace finally lowered her weapon. “Well… you might as well come on in.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
“…and the last thing I remember is putting myself in cryo,” finished Minkowski. They were in the mess, nursing microwaved packets of soup. “Then I woke up and found myself heading toward the Hephaestus. It’s really been years?”  
  
“Afraid so,” said Lovelace. “Hopefully once Hera interfaces with that stolen shuttle of yours we’ll get some answers.”  
  
Minkowski looked like she’d aged thirty years over the course of their conversation. “I’ve eaten in this mess room so many times,” she murmured. “I recognize half the stains on this table. The only thing that’s missing is the giant hole in the ceiling from bullet ricochets… god, I thought I was finally free of this hellhole.”  
  
Fourier met Lovelace’s eyes over their new guest’s shoulder. _What do you think?_ the astrophysicist mouthed. Lovelace tilted her head slightly, hoping to indicate that she was reserving her judgment. Fourier gave a small nod in return.  
  
“Alright,” said Hui, who lacked even a vague sense of subtlety, “if you’re a secret agent enacting some kind of elaborate Goddard-sanctioned psychological experiment on all of us, then you’re a secret agent with phenomenal acting skills. Sorry about what happened to your friend.”  
  
“Yeah, well. At least Hera’s still okay.” She patted the wall absently.  
  
“Um,” Fisher said. He looked as if he was steeling himself to say something that he really would rather not. “There’s something we need to ask you. You mentioned that before you took Kepler’s spacecraft and left, you were… sick. With the Decima virus.”  
  
“I was. Sweating bullets, seeing double, could barely walk straight. It’s a miracle I didn’t blow myself up before I even got on the ship.”  
  
“And that’s amazing in and of itself, obviously, and I’m glad you’re alive and everything, but,” he took a deep breath, “are you still sick?”  
  
Minkowski hesitated. “I don’t know.”  
  
“You don’t know?” Lovelace was mentally cursing herself. How could the captain have allowed that detail to slip her mind? She should have insisted on a quarantine. The entire crew was in danger every second they spent in this woman’s presence.  
  
“I feel fine. Great, actually. I fell sick months before I realized Hilbert wasn’t the person he pretended to be, and I haven’t felt this good since before I first started showing symptoms.”  
  
“Selburg needs to take a look at you,” said Fisher flatly.  
  
 _“Excuse me?”_ Hera snapped. _“He’s not getting anywhere in a light-year’s radius of Commander Minkowski if I have anything to do with it.”_  
  
“Good thing you won’t have anything to do with it, then,” said Lovelace. “C’mon, Minkowski. I don’t like him any more than you do, but I need to make sure you’re not a hazard to my crew.”  
  
 _“No!”_ said Hera, so loud that they all jumped. Lovelace’s hand went to her holster on instinct. _Commander,_ Lovelace thought, and realized she should have noticed earlier. Units like Hera had strict comportment protocols that meant they had to refer to personnel by their rank under almost all circumstances, and if she was calling Minkowski that then it meant Hera’s programming still recognized the lieutenant as the commanding officer of the station. That was a security issue of galactic proportions. _“No, I’ll—I’ll lock the doors, I’ll do—something, just try me!”_  
  
“Stand down, Hera, it’s fine,” said Minkowski. “I don’t think you’ll get a single true word out of that traitorous bastard’s mouth, but I’m looking forward to having a _discussion_ with him.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Before Lovelace escorted Minkowski personally to the medical wing, she pulled aside Fisher and discreetly told him to check out the stolen shuttle. Hera had already interfaced with the shuttle but had found that its damaged computer systems and limited processing power meant that she could only tell so much. They needed to know if it was spaceworthy, and if there were any clues about what the hell was going on. And more importantly, Fisher got paler with every second they spent discussing the possibility of a Decima outbreak, and the captain figured he could do with a few hours of non-death-virus-related work to keep his hands full. Then she had Lambert (armed) and Fourier (unarmed) escort Hilbert to where Lovelace and Minkowski were waiting.  
  
Lovelace had never seen Hilbert so terrified. It was glorious. She was a little jealous. The problem is that it really did look like Hilbert had been telling the truth (“I saw you fall into the star, I _saw_ you”), which left them just as clueless as before.   
  
The next step was Minkowski’s checkup. Lovelace had been prepared to issue threats until the doctor was abundantly clear on what would happen if he deviated even microscopically from her orders, but Hera got there first. She could be terrifying as hell when she wanted to be, and the captain found herself concerned; first of all, the mother program shouldn’t be able to do all of that, and second of all, Hera’s loyalty to her former commander was fierce and unwavering, which could present a problem if it turned out Minkowski needed to be contained. She got the impression that Hera would vent Lovelace out an airlock if Minkowski asked her to, and she wondered if this loyalty was the reason why from the beginning Hera had never quite seemed to accept her authority.  
  
Hilbert still looked shell-shocked, and his apparent confusion only increased as he stared at the blinking screens that displayed the results of the blood test. “Impossible,” he muttered, “completely preposterous.”  
  
“Explain,” ordered Lovelace.  
  
“Your DNA scans show that you are indeed Renee Minkowski. Your blood shows no signs of Decima. Not infection, not dormancy. It’s as if you never came in contact with the virus at all. Or… hmm.” He snuck a glance at the lieutenant. “Interesting.”  
  
“And what exactly do you find so interesting.” Minkowski made it sound like an insult rather than a question.  
  
“Your white blood cell count is abnormally high, as if you recently fought off an infection.”  
  
“You think she threw off your super special pet murder disease?” said Lovelace.  
  
“No! It is _impossible._ Is not ordinary virus, captain, it entwines itself with the host’s genetic code. Even if by some miracle her immune system cleansed itself, Decima would still leave its footprint in her DNA.”  
  
“Or maybe she’s just special. You did say that she… how did you put it? That her ‘sheer bloody-minded stubbornness empowered her to cheat death’.”  
  
Minkowski’s face twisted like she couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or angry.  
  
Hilbert looked impatient. “I need to examine further. Blood is not enough, I require a full examination of her DNA.”  
  
Lovelace laughed sarcastically. “Wow. Oh boy. Yeah, hell no.”  
  
“Do you want to find out what happened or not?”  
  
“I want it, but not as much as I want you to stay far, far away from everyone else on this station.”  
  
He opened his mouth, probably to argue with Lovelace in the most condescending way possible, but he was thankfully interrupted by the door banging open. Hui leapt inside, breathing fast. “Captain, we’ve got a situation.”  
  
“Ah. Just like old times,” muttered Minkowski.  
  
Lovelace snapped into alertness. “What is it?”  
  
“The spaceship—engines damaged—critical condition, Fisher says a radiation leak’s imminent—”  
  
She jumped to the worst case scenario: “Is it about to explode?”  
  
Hui’s expression told her all she needed to know. She tossed her gun to Minkowski, who caught it deftly. “Stay here and shoot him if he blinks wrong,” she said, and followed Hui out the door before either the doctor or the lieutenant could argue.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "ancient names (part ii)" by lord huron


	18. Afterimages

“That ship,” said Minkowski through clenched teeth, “was our best bet at making it home.”  
  
“It—had—bullet—holes—in—its—main—engine,” said Lovelace, in case biting out each word separately would make it fit easier into her houseguest’s thick skull. “It wasn’t just a disaster waiting to happen, it was a disaster that _had_ happened and that you piloted into my goddamn docking bay!”  
  
“Your docking bay? _Your_ docking bay?”  
  
“Oh really, is it yours? Then you should be writing me a thank you card, because I just stopped it from being blown up!”  
  
“You ejected our escape route into the _star!”_  
  
“Are we counting suicide by volatile nuclear reactor as an escape route now? It was about to kill us all!”  
  
“You should have at least consulted with me first—”  
  
“Sorry I didn’t have time for a committee meeting, I was too busy saving your life—”  
  
For a moment Lovelace was positive that Minkowski was going to draw her gun and start a firefight right there. Then, abruptly, the tension drained from her shoulders. “You’re right,” said Minkowski in a much more measured tone. “It was going to explode. You did what I would have done.”  
  
Lovelace had not been expecting that.  
  
While the captain was trying to find something to say, Minkowski added, “I assume there’s some repairs to do? There’s always repairs.”  
  
A few feet away, Fisher and Lambert glanced at each other. (They’d been trying their best to blend in with the wall in order to avoid being caught in the verbal crossfire.) “…no, I think we have it pretty much handled,” said Lambert. “Hui and Fourier don’t have much to do right now, so I reassigned them to maintenance for the next few work rotations.”  
  
“I’m sure they were delighted,” Minkowski said sarcastically. “There’s really nothing I can do?”  
  
Lovelace fixed Lambert with an intense expression that clearly communicated: _Find something and get her out of my hair._ Lambert looked vaguely panicked and said, “Um, um, do you want a tour?”  
  
“A… tour.”  
  
“Y-yes. To see, um, what’s different and what’s not.”  
  
Lovelace was already regretting her decision to delegate this task to Lambert, but Minkowski just snorted. “Why not.”  
  
  
*  
  
  
Minkowski was fine with going along with Lovelace’s plan to get her out of the way of the station’s essential operations for the next few hours. That didn’t mean the seed of resentment was gone entirely, but Minkowski could at least understand it. She wouldn’t want Lovelace looking over her shoulder if their positions were reversed either.  
  
“…and this is where you’ll probably be sleeping,” said Lambert, pushing open the door. “Sorry it hasn’t been cleaned out yet.”  
  
Minkowski surveyed the room and smiled bitterly. The tightly folded sleeping bag, the scrupulous sparseness broken by a few details here and there: a dogeared manual, a floating pen. Hilbert’s personality was unmistakeable.  
  
She didn’t feel as uncomfortable as she would have thought, considering she was taking over the space of her ex-crewmember and two-time mutineer. They left the room and headed down the hallway, passing door after door. Something in her brain ticked off a mental checklist, saying _here, here, here, here_ , the familiar rhythm of navigating the crew quarters—and then came to an abrupt halt with a stretch of wall that used to hold a porthole.  
  
She hadn’t realized she’d stopped until Lambert asked, “Uh, commander?”  
  
She reached out and rapped the metal with her fingers. A hollow sound. It rang in her head for several seconds after it faded from her ear. “Anything on the other side of this?” she asked, her own voice sounding distant, as if there were layers of cotton between her and the rest of the world.  
  
“Don’t think so,” said Lambert slowly.  
  
“It’s where Eiffel’s quarters should be.” With that, she hooked a foot against a handhold and propelled herself swiftly onward, leaving the stretch of wall behind and Lambert to catch up.  
  
They went through the engineering wing and the science wing, where Minkowski silently noted the signs of technological advancement. Lambert gave a rambling narration, and she listened to the way the words were said more than the words themselves. Eiffel would have called him stuffy and uptight, and Minkowski would have responded that he was merely competent and professional but she understood why Eiffel might not recognize those qualities, hem hem. She was struck by how hard it was to handle the ghost of a conversation that never was, echoing in her ear like the sea in a shell. She felt as if at any moment they would turn a corner and Eiffel would pass them going the other direction, give an absent wave, bicker with Hera out of the corner of his mouth, arms occupied with some inane project he was using to procrastinate.  
  
The subtle sense of wrongness increased the longer they wandered the station with no other goal than to look—it hadn’t been this hard when she was trying to put the fear of God into Hilbert, when she was in a rage over the loss of the stolen spaceship. Finally she interrupted her guide and said, “I’ve heard a lot about these alien music transmissions. Can I have a listen?”  
  
The comms room under Lambert’s control was strikingly different from the comms room under Eiffel’s: no uniform jacket left to float near the doorway, no packets of freeze-dried space food left carelessly near the consoles. She couldn’t help but see it the way it had been in the days before Eiffel was too weak to drag himself from his quarters, imprinted on her eyelids like the afterimage of a brilliant explosion. Out of habit she toed at the place behind the main console where Eiffel had hid his contraband stash, apparently under the impression that she hadn’t known about it. It opened up, bare and empty _of course_ , she hadn’t expected anything different—  
  
She ignored the way Lambert’s face twisted in confusion. None of his business.  
  
One thing was the same, though, and that was the way the comms officers’ shoulders twitched up defensively when someone entered their territory. It was kind of endearing.  
  
Lambert played the transmissions. “Huh,” she said eventually. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s so…”  
  
“Normal?”  
  
“Yeah. The weirdest thing we ever got was a plant monster living in the vents.”  
  
Lambert chuckled nervously, then stopped. “Wait, are you—are you serious?”  
  
Telling the story of her crusade against Specimen 34 took enough concentration to stop her from remembering where she was, at least for a while. Once that was done, she made an excuse about needing sleep and made her way back to Hilb—her quarters.  
  
She dimmed the lights and strapped herself into the sleeping bag and faked unconsciousness, hoping that she would do it well enough to fool herself. Just as she was on the verge of succeeding, a voice broke the surface of her awareness. She blinked the tendrils of sleep from her eyes and mumbled, “What d’ya say, Hera?”  
  
_“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”_  
  
“It’s no problem. Wasn’t really asleep. Something wrong?”  
  
_“No. I was just asking if you’re okay.”_  
  
“As okay as I can be, I think. What about you?”  
  
_“Well. I’ve had a long time to adjust.”_  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
_“I can talk about it now. Not that I really want to—I kind of really, really don’t—but I have the option. Frankly I think I’m about as okay as I’m going to get.”_  
  
“I’m sorry,” said Minkowski. She’d been looking for a way to say it since she realized Hera was still there, still keeping every inch of the Hephaestus alive and humming with her swift mind. “I didn’t mean to leave without you. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known.”  
  
_“But you didn’t know,”_ said Hera. _“Really, it’s alright. I don’t mind. Even if you had known I could be repaired, it would still have been the only logical choice. That ship’s server couldn’t hold me.”_  
  
“Hera, I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to believe me. Put it in write-only memory or something if you have to. _I’m not going to leave without you.”_  
  
_“You shouldn’t make that kind of promise.”_  
  
“If we’re talking ‘shouldn’t’, then I shouldn’t have came to this damn station in the first place. And yet here I am. That’s how it goes sometimes.”  
  
_“Whatever you say, Commander,”_ said Hera softly.  
  
Minkowski slipped into sleep filled with something hard to name. Absent of fear, absent of anger, yes, but not filled with happiness. Not quite contentment. Not quite peace.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: "systematic" by 100 watt horse


	19. Duct Tape

Minkowski’s stolen shuttle had made quite a few scorch marks when it had to be forcibly ejected before it blew up and took the station’s infrastructure with it, so Lovelace went down to the hangar bay to see what repairs need to be done. She found that Fourier had beaten her there. The young scientist had three rolls of duct tape hanging around her left wrist like bracelets. She periodically stopped to draw another length of tape to help her fasten together the broken halves of a support frame that would be necessary if they ever had another shuttle to lodge in their dock. Fourier was making quiet humming noises to herself and didn’t notice the captain’s approach.  
  
“It’s still your work rotation?” asked Lovelace, confused.  
  
Fourier turned. “Hmm? Oh. No, that ended a few hours ago.” She went back to winding tape around the support.  
  
And kept on wrapping, and wrapping and wrapping… “Uh, I think you’ve got that one secured,” Lovelace said. Fourier glanced at it, made a surprised hmm’ing noise, and moved on to the next. Her gaze was focused somewhere in the middle distance and her fingers appeared to be moving more or less of their own accord.  
  
“If your work rotation ended, then why are you still working?”  
  
A shrug. “Oh, you know.”  
  
“I… don’t think I do know.”  
  
“I’ve already finished all the star readings for today and I’ve finished, er, lying my way through the logs for command, and now I’m thinking about something and I’m doing this to keep my hands busy. You know.”  
  
Fourier seemed too lost in thought to notice that she’d finished securing the second support she was working on, so Lovelace pointed out, “I think you’ve got that one done too.”  
  
“Mm? Hmm, yes. That’ll do. I’ll go find something else then.” With that, Fourier patted the support absently and pushed off toward the door to the rest of the station.  
  
“What are you thinking about?” Lovelace asked, but Fourier had already left.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Fact: it had been a long work rotation for Officer Lambert. Well, nowadays they were all long, even when he had the suddenly-exciting-and-also-terribly-ominous DSALS to look forward to. Weeks’ worth of near-death experiences all in a row tended to do that to you, and he was at the stage of exhaustion when it became easier to just think of everything as a series of facts that led to the occasional conclusion, without all the tricky work of unnecessary thinking in between.  
  
Conclusion: it was time to head to the mess and get a nice refreshing lukewarm cup of seaweed coffee.  
  
He opened the cabinet and picked up the jar from its magnetized holder. He frowned. Fact: it was unusually light, much lighter than it had been two day/night cycles ago. Fact: Hilbert wasn’t allowed outside of the empty storage room that Minkowski referred to as the ‘brig.’ Fact: Hilbert would not be making the crew anymore seaweed coffee anytime soon. “Hera,” he said, “do you know why virtually our entire supply of synthetic seaweed particulate has vanished overnight?”  
  
_“It’s been more or less a group effort, but I did note that Doctor Fourier has increased her caffeine intake by 160% recently,”_ she replied.  
  
He shook the jar. It had been heavy and full the last time he’d held it. That was a lot of coffee for one person. “In what time frame?”  
  
_“I’d say… the last twenty-nine hours?”_  
  
Fact: he’d seen Fourier up and about approximately thirty-eight hours ago. Conclusion: she hadn’t slept properly in the past two days. He rubbed at his eyes and contemplated just returning to his quarters and getting some sleep of his own (his aching back and the crick in his neck strongly seconded that suggestion), but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the concern unresolved when he knew that a crewmember was endangering themselves via sleep deprivation and the rest of the crew in the bargain. Conclusion: he had to find Fourier and put a stop to this disturbance in routine. “Hera, where is Doctor Fourier currently located?”  
  
He followed Hera’s directions to the lab that she and Hui had needed to escape violently when Hilbert had drained it of breathable air during his insurrection. She was trying to repair the door they’d burned through with corrosive chemicals via duct tape. It was an obviously hopeless effort, but that didn’t seem to bother her.  
  
Lambert coughed to get her attention. It didn’t work. He coughed louder. Finally he waved his hand in front of her nose and she jumped back, startled. “Hello, Lambert,” she said, and then made as if to return to her work.  
  
“Doctor, I noticed you’re trying to repair a complex and sensitive piece of locking technology by cocooning it plastic tape with a high tensile strength,” he said. She made a vaguely affirmative sound. He continued, “I was wondering if you’d fully considered the cost-benefit analysis of this endeavor.” She made another vaguely affirmative sound. “In other words, you’ve made a very nice cocoon but I’m fairly sure you haven’t actually improved the functionality of the locking mechanism, especially since it’s still melted into an unrecognizable gray lump.”  
  
“Yes,” she said slowly, when it apparently dawned on her that he wasn’t going to go away until she responded.  
  
“Is there a _reason_ you’re doing this instead of, for example, taking advantage of your scheduled sleep rotation?”  
  
She gestured aimlessly. “I’m thinking. I can’t go to sleep when I’m thinking.”  
  
Fact: her clothes were wrinkled, more hair had escaped her tie than was still contained, and the bags under her eyes were large enough to lobby for their own legally recognized municipality. Fact: none of them were feeling especially mentally stable right now. Fact: he was finding it hard to go to sleep lately when he saw flashes of everything they’d been through whenever he shut his eyelids, dead men’s faces and silent explosions and airless rooms. Conclusion: fixing this might involve _talking about emotions_. While never a pleasant experience, it was generally the kind of thing where it was better to rip the bandaid off fast rather than let it fester. He took a deep breath, bracing himself, and said, “Yeah, I guess I know what you mean.”  
  
She looked flabbergasted. “You do?”  
  
“Yeah. I know I tend to—act like everything is normal and go on with my work like nothing every happened. I know it looks like I’m unaffected by all this. But the truth is… I’m shaken up.”  
  
“I never thought you were unaffected by all this,” she said. “It’s been clear that you’ve been a mess since we realized Goddard was lying to us.”  
  
He forged on. “What I mean to say is that we still have to take care of ourselves. In ways that maybe don’t involve finishing up all the coffee stores in one go. And Fourier… Victoire… if you ever need anyone to talk to… I’m here.”  
  
“That’s kind of you. But that’s not why I’m staying awake.”  
  
“It’s—it’s not?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Then why?”  
  
“I have an idea, but if I interrupt my train of thought for too long, the idea will slip away. And that would be bad. And if I sit still I get restless, so I’m fixing things around the station to keep myself busy.”  
  
“Not that we’re not grateful for your help,” said Lambert, recovering valiantly, “but duct tape can’t fix everything.”  
  
“You frown a lot. I think if you could stop yourself from frowning unconsciously, you could make yourself relax more.” She looked at him intently. Then she carefully snipped a length of duct tape from the roll around her wrist with a pair of shears and pressed it onto his forehead. She smoothed it down so that there were no air bubbles while he was still too startled to process. “There,” she said gently. “That should help.”  
  
“What,” he sputtered.  
  
“I hope you feel better,” she told him, and then wandered off.  
  
  
*  
  
  
“Hera,” said Fourier, “is there anything else on board that might be in need of repairs?”  
  
_“Um,”_ said Hera, who had discerned a trend in Fourier’s recent behavior and was not looking forward to having her auxiliary servers ‘repaired’ via judicious application of duct tape. _“There are some cabinets with dislodged hinges in the cargo bay.”_  
  
“Thanks.” Fourier moved toward the aft side of the station. She encountered an obstacle in the form of a wall, which had mysteriously appeared directly in front of where she was trying to move. She frowned at it—Hera quickly logged the symptoms of sleep deprivation and caffeine overindulgence—shifted slightly to the left, and continued onward.  
  
_“Um, Doctor?”_  
  
“Yes?”  
  
_“The cargo bay isn’t that way.”_  
  
“It isn’t?”  
  
_“No.”_  
  
“Hm. I could have sworn it was this way last time I checked. Where did it go off to, then?”  
  
_“In the opposite direction from where you’re headed, actually.”_  
  
“Fascinating,” murmured Fourier, and turned around.  
  
  
*  
  
  
After some time, Fourier found herself back in her quarters. She was paging through the engine blueprints, thinking furiously. She’d progressed to the stage of the brainstorming process that required reliance on more solid information. It was extremely annoying to be interrupted by a sharp knock on her door, especially when it swung open without permission.  
  
“Go away, Kuan, I’m concentrating.”  
  
“On what?” he said, entering with a thermos of something hot and steaming. “Because if someone is about to freak out and try to kill us all, I’d appreciate advance notice. As in, before we’re nearly asphyxiated again.”  
  
“What? No, it’s nothing like that.”  
  
“Are you sure? Because last time you did the thinky-thinky-isolating-self-with-busywork thing, it turned out Fisher was secretly the subject of immoral medical experimentation.”  
  
“I’d hardly call it _secret._ It was right under our noses, we just didn’t notice in time. And I’ll tell you as soon as I’m done thinking.”  
  
“I’d find that bargain more acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that you haven’t stopped thinking about something or another since you were eight years old. Just put down the manuals and talk to me for a few minutes. Look, I even brought you some tea. I used up the last of this week’s lukewarm water supply to do it, too.”  
  
She sighed. “I’m trying to find us a way off the station.”  
  
“Go on.”  
  
“It’s complicated. Obviously. There are two viable routes, as far as I can tell. We either somehow convince Goddard to take us home, or we build our own ship.”  
  
He paused. “I assume you’re using ‘viable’ in the loosest sense possible.”  
  
“Absolutely. Convincing Goddard to save us… we’d have to have something that they would want in their hands on Earth so badly that they would spend ridiculous amounts of resources getting us off this station, not to mention risk us spilling the truth to every major news outlet on the planet. And building our own ship is theoretically possible, if we cannibalize the station’s infrastructure—I’ve spent all day going around the place and looking at our available resources—but none of us are rocket scientists. Either way it would be a gamble, probably the worst gamble you and I have ever taken. The odds are definitely not in our favor. So I’m trying to think of a way to change those odds.”  
  
“Sounds reasonable,” said Hui. “Now drink some tea, show me what you’re looking at, and we’ll talk it over together.”  
  
“Fine,” she said with a huff, taking the thermos. She took a sip and flipped open the manual to the page showing the reactor core. “See this? This is what gives us…” She yawned. It was odd; she was feeling suddenly sleepy. She took another sip. “…this is what gives the rest of the station power. It’s linked to the engines, so that in an emergency…” Another yawn. “…in an emergency… the mother program can determine what systems require the most power. Now, that’s something that’s difficult for Hera to control outside of an emergency protocol situation, but I think…” The page was swimming before her eyes. She frowned. She looked at the tea suspiciously. _“Kuan.”_  
  
“To be fair,” he said, “you _did_ sedate me that one time with the Tesla coil experiment and the meteor shower. Also, Hera suggested it first.”  
  
“I _outrank_ you,” she said muzzily, and promptly keeled over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com), where you can go if you want progress updates and snippets for this fic and others


	20. The Calculus of Necessity

It was quiet, in the empty storage room, and boring. It provided Hilbert with a lot of time to be alone with his thoughts. He wished mildly that Lovelace had put him in the observation deck, where at least there would be a view. But in the past few months Hui and Fourier had moved various pieces of equipment there out of frustration with the long walk between the observation deck and the science wing, and they probably told the captain about the one or two machines that Hilbert might be able to use to connect to the station’s systems. The only company he got was Lovelace delivering food and water, and those interactions were mostly a competition to see who could stay silent and impassive the longest. Occasionally he would ask Hera an inane question, if only to hear someone’s voice, and though her scathing replies were hardly pleasant, there was something grounding about them.  
  
This meant it was a surprise when the door to the storage room unlocked and Hui stepped inside.  
  
Hilbert raised his eyebrows. “To what do I owe the visit?”  
  
Hui paused, just looking at him for a second. His brows were knitting together like he was struggling with himself. Finally he said, “Fourier has a plan. Well, a theory.”  
  
“Does she.”  
  
“She thinks there are two ways to get us home, if Goddard won’t take us home when our mission is supposed to end.”  
  
“Two ways?” He could think of one, but unless Lovelace had an abrupt change of heart and allowed him to continue his research full-time it would never be viable.  
  
“Her theory is that we could somehow convince Goddard the research we have is important enough that they need to take us and our findings back to Earth in one piece, or we could build our own ride home.”  
  
“Build… a spaceship,” said Hilbert incredulously. “I assume that is what we are discussing.”  
  
“Yeah, pretty much.”  
  
“And she suggests we get the parts from where?”  
  
“The station. We’ve been drawing up diagrams with Fisher and Hera—theoretically speaking, we could take recycle parts of the _Hephaestus_ without damaging the most important functions of the station. We have cryopods, computers, and air filters to spare. There are a ton of spare rooms with metal and plastic infrastructure that aren’t doing anything where they are right now. We have everything we need for a shuttle except for an engine—”  
  
“Oh yes, minor detail,” Hilbert said, dripping with sarcasm. “Only an _engine_.”  
  
“—but we can figure out a workaround,” Hui went on stubbornly. “It might work.”  
  
“ _Might_ does not fly spaceships.”  
  
“No, but Lovelace does, and Lovelace can make anything fly.”  
  
“If you are so certain in the viability of your plan, then why are you here?”  
  
That stopped Hui in his tracks. After thirty seconds of his mouth opening and closing, he finally said, “You’ve got a good brain. I was just running it past you.”  
  
“…No. That is not the reason you are here.”  
  
Hilbert knew a lot about Hui. Yes, the younger scientist was frustrating. Yes, he was prone to procrastination and frequently put socialization over his tasks. He did not possess the occasional flashes of intellect that Fourier had, sharp and sudden like sunlight flaring off of steel, but there were ways in which he was more dedicated to his work. The rest of the crew was quick to write off Hui’s willingness to take risks, even ones that put him and his colleagues in danger, as recklessness or charming naivety, but it was born of a willingness to do whatever it took to achieve his goals. Fourier loved science, but Hui was the one who would do anything for it.  
  
Well. Almost anything.  
  
Hui glares. “What, were you expecting a dinner date? I don’t even want to look at you.”  
  
“Except you are looking at me like a riddle you cannot solve,” said Hilbert. “Whatever you came to ask, spit it out.”  
  
Hui was still for a long moment. Then he said, “Minkowski. She fought off the virus, somehow. And you don’t know how that could have happened. But I’m guessing you have a theory.”  
  
“So you are curious too.”  
  
“Of course I’m curious! She appears out of the middle of nowhere three years later, with a hijacked spaceship and a magically cured immune system! Sure, maybe she developed an immunity, that happens even with the strongest of diseases, humans are pretty resilient, but if Decima alters a subject’s DNA and her DNA exhibited no signs of the virus, then what the hell is going on?”  
  
“Have you ever been to a carnival, Doctor Hui?”  
  
“If this is another obnoxious metaphor I swear I’m gonna—”  
  
“A magician’s show,” said Hilbert, speaking over him, “produces marvels in eyes of audience because the audience is looking in wrong direction. Magician puts ball under one of three cups and moves cups around and around in dizzying sequence. He tells everyone to watch, to keep their eyes on ball, and meanwhile slips ball up magician’s sleeve.”  
  
“You’re saying someone’s playing a trick on us.”  
  
“Misdirection is powerful. Is only thing that can explain a woman on the edge of death falling into a star and returning intact three years later.”  
  
“I don’t believe you saw her fall into Wolf 359,” said Hui. “It’s—there’s just no way. There are some things I can’t believe without going absolutely crazy. You’re obviously lying.”  
  
“I am very good liar, Hui. So why on Earth would I pick a lie so ridiculous? What would I have to gain by maintaining the ruse?”  
  
“Well, I dunno, but you did literally just give me a speech about misdirection…”  
  
“Fine. Let us set that aside. Regardless of what I did or did not see, consider state of the _Urania_ when it arrived in _Hephaestus_ docking bay. Bullet holes in main engine, I hear.” Rather, the entire station had heard Lovelace and Minkowski shouting at each other over it. “How did the engine survive a trip through deep space for years, only to conveniently delay its explosion until after it appeared here? It could not. Therefore, it cannot be the same spaceship.”  
  
“What,” said Hui flatly.  
  
“It may have the same logo on the hull. It may have sustained the same type of damage. It may have even carried the same passenger. But it cannot plausibly be same ship that departed from _Hephaestus_ at end of last mission.”  
  
“What, you think someone created an exact replica of a half-destroyed shuttle, stuffed Minkowski in it, and sent it in our direction? Why would someone do that? I mean, there’s not much I wouldn’t be prepared for Goddard Futuristics to pull, but what agenda would they possibly have?”  
  
“I do not know. I also do not know why whoever sent that shuttle to our station sent Minkowski with it, or why they somehow extricated Decima from her system. Because surely what caused one must have caused the other. Of course, this is all speculation. I do not have the data to make further hypotheses. If I could conduct a full examination of Minkowski’s physiology—”  
  
“Ha, ha, ha, very funny,” said Hui. “Yeah, _no._ We are never letting you do so much as hold a stethoscope if we can help it.”  
  
“This is not the time for grudges or suspicion. Unsolved mysteries on this station have a troublesome tendency to become deadly threats.” Hilbert decided to push a little further. “And this could have a significant impact on my research. It has the potential to take or spare the lives of thousands of people.”  
  
“So far your research has had the net effect of saving no one and killing one person. Sorry if I’m a little skeptical.”  
  
“Please,” Hilbert scoffed. “You have studied mathematics. One life in exchange for a million is not a difficult math problem. I know you understand the calculus of necessity.”  
  
“I don’t understand anything about you.”  
  
“Is that what you tell yourself when you can’t sleep at night? I have seen your file. I know why Goddard hired you. It was not because of your Berkeley PhD or your inability to do your job without distractions. You did not exactly devote your days before you went to space to cleaning up litter or baking cookies for neighborhood children. The fact that you are accusing me of ethical bankruptcy, when your research—”  
  
“Was nothing like yours,” said Hui, knuckles tightening. “It was nothing like this. I never got anyone killed. I never planned to deceive anyone. I never resorted to murder to fix my mistakes.”  
  
“And yet,” said Hilbert, “you understand why I would make sacrifices for the sake of a future without illness or infirmity.”  
  
“Yeah, well.” Hui spun around and wrenched open the door. “‘Understand’ isn’t the same as ‘accept’.”  
  
The door slammed shut behind him.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Fourier hadn’t meant to eavesdrop.  
  
Once she woke up, she had tried to contact Hui via his personal comms device, mostly to yell at him and maybe to ask his opinion on her plans now that she was decaffeinated and less sleep deprived and presumably in a better position to listen. Predictably, he’d managed to forget it somewhere, and didn’t pick up. She considered asking Hera to yell at him over the stationwide PA system for her, but then remembered that Hera had been a coconspirator. Then she recalled Hui’s makeshift radio and the fact that he’d tucked it away somewhere in the bag he slung over his shoulder along with spare tools, a jumble of pens and notepads, and freeze-dried astronaut snacks. He had a habit of forgetting about anything he’d stuffed in there until he had a use for it, and then spending an hour combing the station for it before finally realizing he was carrying it around the whole time.   
  
She tuned her comms device to the radio’s frequency and took a breath, about to speak and get Hui’s attention. But she hadn’t been expecting the voice she heard on the other end. _“—you understand the calculus of necessity,”_ said Doctor Hilbert.  
  
She was so blindsided that she missed Hui’s reply, wondering what on Earth Hui was doing, engaging the dangerous prisoner in conversation. Then Hilbert was saying, _“I have seen your file. I know why Goddard hired you,”_ and as he went on, a sinking feeling landed in Fourier’s gut. She didn’t think she wanted to hear this.  
  
But she didn’t turn the radio off.  
  
 _“The fact that you are accusing me of ethical bankruptcy, when your research—”_  
  
 _“Was nothing like yours,”_ said Hui, but she knew what he sounded like when he was trying to defend against something he knew was true.  
  
She listened until she heard the door lock, and then, quietly, she set the radio down.


End file.
